Sleater Kinney

Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein met in Bellingham, at a show by Tucker's duo Heavens to Betsy on the campus of Western Washington University, where Brownstein had just enrolled. Corin was studying at Evergreen State College, a liberal arts college famous for its experimental teaching methods – Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, also graduated there – and was part of the riot grrrl movement in Olympia alongside Kathleen Hanna and Bikini Kill. "Come to Olympia", and Carrie didn't need to be told twice. That's how Sleater-Kinney were born.

Both hailing from the Pacific Northwest – Tucker from Eugene, Brownstein from Seattle – the two decided to intertwine their fates within one of the most uncompromising DIY underground rock scenes in the United States: that of Olympia, the capital city of Washington State, a kind of twin to Washington DC, the federal capital. The band's original sound, however, took shape in Australia, far from any direct influence or potential interference, where the pair had travelled for a few months to find their own voice, recording their raw self-titled debut (Chainsaw, 1995) the day before flying home, at drummer Laura MacFarlane's house in Melbourne.

This choice speaks to that "hunger" – a word Brownstein uses in the title of her memoir, "Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl" (Penguin Random House, 2015) – that would push the band to keep raising the bar of complexity with every album, moving beyond any comfort zone except the one they would learn to build for themselves, together, time after time, as a band. This is how Sleater-Kinney turned music into life: the creative and songwriting process became the way they articulated their being in the world, not only as a process of self-examination and negotiation between inner and outer worlds, but also as a way of relating to one another within the band itself. This is how the methods of deconstructing language studied at college and practiced within the Olympia community became an integral part of an artistic process that expresses an uninterrupted dialogue between parts – above all between Tucker and Brownstein – and that itself tells the story of what it meant to be who you are in the United States of the mid-Nineties. One starting point for this dialogue is the tuning of Tucker's guitar, in C#, "tuned" to match her own vocal timbre, over which Brownstein's guitar lines are built. Another is the choice, shared with other Olympia bands like Beat Happening, to go without a bass. Every song rests on the interplay of the two guitars, and collapses if either one drops out.

After the second album, "Call The Doctor" (Chainsaw, 1996), again recorded with MacFarlane, which drew attention from both audiences and critics – the Village Voice named it among the best listens of the year – the duo went looking for a permanent drummer. With Janet Weiss on board, the pair's synergy became explosive, from the very first run-throughs of "Dig Me Out": "Immediately Janet grounded the song in a way we've never heard, giving each of our guitar parts a place to go… She bashed out a body, a spine, finally making that album title sound like an order and not a plea… We realized we might be able to succeed in fulfilling expectations, other's and also our own. Our song and our sound now had an anchor and a backbone that Corin and I could rest upon" (Brownstein, 2015: 124, 129).

Looking for greater visibility and wider distribution, and despite interest from majors and labels like Matador, the trio signed a new deal with Kill Rock Stars, a label as emblematic of Olympia as K Records, choosing to stay rooted in the values of the scene they came from. For the production too, they turned to a studio and an engineer the band already knew. The album was recorded at John and Stu's Place in Seattle during one of the worst snowstorms in Pacific Northwest history, in two freezing rooms – the same ones where Nirvana had recorded "Bleach" (Sub Pop, 1989) with Jack Endino – over ten days of total studio time.

Sound engineer John Goodmanson's job was more that of a documentarian than a producer: his goal was to act as the conduit, the medium, the one who could capture and translate onto record the band's energy and sound, without artifice. For the recordings, Sleater-Kinney played all together live, using the same amps and settings, adding vocals afterwards and keeping overdubs to a minimum. For the mix, the first thing Goodmanson did was pan the guitars – a choice that would come to define many of the band's records – placing one hard right and one hard left: if you can't listen in stereo, you can't really listen to Sleater-Kinney.

The tracklist follows the same philosophy Goodmanson used on "Nevermind" (Nirvana, Geffen, 1991): put the strongest songs first, in a similar rhythmic and emotional sequence, with the most powerful one leading the charge. That's how "Dig Me Out" came to open the album and give it its title, the third record born out of a mix of emotional and personal tensions, above all the breakup of Tucker and Brownstein's relationship and the beginning of Tucker's relationship with photographer and director Lance Bangs, still her husband today:

Dig me out

Dig me in

Out of this mess

Baby, out of my head

Dig me out

Dig me in

Out of my body

Out of my skin

You got me

For now

I'm here

For now

What do you want?

What do you know?

Do you get nervous

Making me go?

Get into your sores

Get into your things

Do you get nervous

Watching me bleed?

In "One More Hour", another track that explicitly references the breakup, the two singer-guitarists engage in open dialogue, especially in the chorus:

In one more hour, I will be gone

In one more hour, I’ll leave this room

The dress you wore, the pretty shoes

Are things I left behind for you

Oh, you’ve got the darkest eyes

Oh, you’ve got the darkest eyes

I needed it (I know, I know, I know)

Oh I needed it (It's so hard for you to let it go)

I needed it (I know, I know, I know)

So the music, nervy and exciting, once again becomes a way to confront the present, to come to terms with the most painful feelings but also with renewed emotion for the other, as in "Turn Me On", all cushioned by the drumming of a musician with the quality and power of Weiss:

Oh oh it's too hot

Oh oh it's too good

It’s just that

When you touched me

I could not

Stand up

Oh I fell into

Oh oh I fell down

Turn, turn it on, turn, turn it on

You can turn it on, turn it into my song

I want to turn it on, turn it all night long

Sleater-Kinney's distinctive musical blend reveals, beneath the surface, a range of influences: the raw, essential sound of Pacific Northwest bands, the post-punk of Gang Of Four, Television and Talking Heads, the rock of Kinks – who directly inspired the album cover, a tribute to “The Kink Kontroversy” (Pye, 1965) – and Rolling Stones. “Dig Me Out” flows with a galvanic energy of jolts and fractures, moving between the surf-rock of “Words And Guitar” and “Little Babies”, the punk of “It’s Enough” and the garage sound of “Not What You Want”, with singular moments like “Heart Factory” – played on the studio's radiators – and “Dance Song 97”, before closing with the noisy rock ballad “Jenny”, where Tucker's commanding voice unfolds over lopsided terrain with a Velvet Underground mood:

I am the girl

I am the ghost

I am the wife

I am the one

The album came out in 1997 and paved the way for the band's success, which would go on to be covered, sometimes quite controversially, in mainstream outlets like Time. The band's “battle” against the pigeonholing labels assigned to them by the music press – “feminist rockers”, “women in rock”, “girl group” – grew ever fiercer, as did their fight against the patronizing attitude of industry insiders. On this front, Tucker made a zine titled “Hey Soundguy” during the album's tour, in which she introduced and reviewed every sound engineer they worked with, most of them men.

“Dig Me Out” is the manifesto of what the band's music was for its first ten years, up until the extraordinary apotheosis of “The Woods” (Sub Pop, 2003): music that is present and fully embodied in the moment; that calls out to you and demands you take a stance; that requires focused, attentive listening rather than distraction; that you can't just put on in the background. Never truly pleasant, but jagged, urgent, self-aware, raw, emotional.

Justin Mitchell's documentary film “Songs For Cassavetes” (2001) frames the state of grace of a trio of musicians fully aware of their own role, both to themselves and to others, and of issues that in the '90s deeply marked and defined the alternative/indie-rock music of the Seattle and Olympia scenes, such as their dealings with the mass media, the risks of drifting away from a tangible, grounded community toward the mainstream, and all the dead ends that such a shift could bring, suicide among them.

Their tenacity and their rich musical journey, of which “Dig Me Out” represents one of the high points, brings to mind another point raised in Mitchell's film: the idea of ageing in rock culture, which Sleater-Kinney – now back to being a duo following Weiss's departure – continue not so much to confront as to embody, in the fullest sense of the word, just as every theme and value they hold has been expressed so far in their music and in the way they've steered the band's path.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

03/04/2022