and then

Sleater-Kinney: No Cities to Love

Now is the time: breaking the decade of relative silence that followed Sleater-Kinney‘s prodigious supposed finale, 2005’s The Woods, the girls are back in town. We have arrived at the critical reappraisal and celebrated comeback of music’s most revered feminist saviors of American rock’n’roll. It is 2015 and we are staring down Sleater-Kinney’s wise eighth album—exactly 50 years removed from the birth of “R-e-s-p-e-c-t”, exactly 40 years removed from the birth of Horses, exactly 30 years removed from when Kim Gordon first yells “brave men run away from me” in the Mojave desert, exactly 20 years removed from Sleater-Kinney, a primal, insurrectionist warning shot from the margins. Ever since, we have had Corin Tucker, Carrie Brownstein, and Janet Weiss to soundtrack our societal chaos and progressing zeitgeist: tangled agitation, pummeled norms, principled wit, sublimity, sadness, friction, kicks.

Nowadays, there is a prevailing notion that we ought not want such epochal bands as Sleater-Kinney to reunite, because why tarnish the legend of “Best Band in the World” acclaim and a perfectly ascendant seven-album streak? But if any band in the past two decades has proved they’ve got the intellect, skepticism, and emotional capacity to deserve this—to keep living—it’s Sleater-Kinney. No Cities to Love is a disarming, liberationist force befitting the Sleater-Kinney canon. Fervent political leftism has been implicit to this Olympia-born trio since they first inverted Boston’s “More Than a Feeling” on a 1994 comp and that goes on here as well; we desperately need it. It is astonishing that a radical DIY punk band could grow up and keep going with this much dignity and this many impossibly chiseled choruses. No Pistol, Ramone, or unfortunate mutation of Black Flag could have done this.

The necessity of change—the creative virtue of ripping it up and starting again—remains a crucial strand of Sleater-Kinney’s DNA. This is still them: low-tuned classic rock tropes resuscitated with punk urgency, raw and jagged like Wire compressing crystalline Marquee Moon coils. Weiss’ massive swoop is still the band’s throbbing heart, pumping Sleater-Kinney’s blood. But Brownstein has said they set out to find “a new approach to the band” and that is true of No Cities to Love. It is no less emphatic and corporeal than punk classics Call the Doctor and Dig Me Out. But unlike their last two albums of monstrous combat rock, No Cities to Love keeps only the most addictive elements—if Sleater-Kinney are still taking Joey Ramone as a spiritual guide, this is their mature, honed, and clean-sounding Rocket to Russia. Catchy as all-clashing hell, it’s Sleater-Kinney’s most front-to-back accessible album, amping their omnipresent love of new wave pop with aerodynamic choruses that reel and reel, enormously shouted and gasped and sung with a dead-cool drawl. The album has the particular aliveness of music being created and torn from a group at this very moment—tempered, but with the wild-paced abandon that comes with being caged and then free.

As ever, empathy is Sleater-Kinney’s renewable energy source. They have always made a kind of folk music—songs of real people—and opener “Price Tag” is an honest example of this, fueled by Tucker’s motherly responsibility. In concrete detail, it describes the struggle of a working class family in the context of American capitalism and financial crisis (it rings of the high cost of low prices). Real life power dynamics permeate No Cities, among the rubbery synth lines of the otherwise venomous “Fangless” (which I know will frighten off a couple to-the-bone punk purists, like garlic wards off evil) and the anxious post-hardcore lurch of “No Anthems”, which Albini could have produced. On the glammy “Gimme Love”, Tucker plainly wants more of that four-letter-word for girls and outsiders (she seems to wish, in the words of de Beauvoir, “that every human life might be pure transparent freedom”). Brownstein, meanwhile, sings some of the most elliptical and oblique lyrics of her career: “I was lured by the devil… I’ll choose sin ’til I leave,” she hollers like a Bad Seed, clenched and possessed. In lighter moments, it’s heartening to hear Tucker and Brownstein in unison at the record’s sing-song center: “No outline will ever hold us/ It’s not a new wave/ It’s just you and me.”

Sleater-Kinney began work on No Cities in earnest around May 2012, they have said, but especially on the anthemic title track and “Hey Darling”—the first two songs they wrote—you can hear echoes of that decade of pause, an airing out of just why. The titular phrase is abstract enough, but considering Brownstein’s vocal incompatibility with the van-show-van-show tour-life void—and her lines, here, about “a ritual of emptiness”—it plays like a direct take on the complicated reality of the rootless rock band and its scattered tribe. On “Hey Darling”, one of Tucker’s gummiest melodies becomes a letter to fans, reasoning her hiding: “It seems to me the only thing/ That comes from fame is mediocrity,” and then, “Sometimes the shout of the room/ Makes me feel so alone.” The slow-burn of “Fade”, the closer, also takes on Sleater-Kinney’s hiatus. Tucker is like a Robert Plant putting her supernatural quasi-operatic range on display over epic, minor-key hard rock, switching from sly-voiced ballad to high-pitched inflection: “If there’s no tomorrow/ You better live,” she sings of a dimming spotlight, her slipping self-perception. It’s the closest No Cities gets to The Woods’ feminist rewrite of ’70s rock grandeur, and yet sounds like nothing on that record. Sleater-Kinney’s discography is full of songs delivering meta-commentaries on what it means to be women playing rock; No Cities is more purely personal and explicitly political, evidence enough that in the context of family, middle-age, and multiple careers, it is possible to have everything.

For the first time in 21 years, Sleater-Kinney have written an album without a proper stomach-twisting tearjerker; no wistful confessions, breathless breakups, or dying lovers, no “Good Things”, “One More Hour”, or “The Size of Our Love”. But I predict Sleater-Kinney will be making more people cry this year than ever before—maybe Lena Dunham, maybe Perfect Pussy’s Meredith Graves, definitely Fred Armisen (tears are highly subjective, and yet my claim is substantiated). “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion famously wrote, and we align ourselves with the potent narratives of great bands for the same reason. Their songs guide us through the restless process of figuring out who we are. We search for meaning in rhythm and couplets and distortion, and if a band is grounded with as much purpose as Sleater-Kinney, they charge our consciousness, occupy space in our relationships, symbolize what we want to become. Sleater-Kinney’s music still does this. It tells us—women or anyone who has ever felt small and othered—the truth, that even when the world seems to deny it, we are never powerless. Now the story goes on longer; it didn’t have to end.

from Album Reviews – Pitchfork http://ift.tt/1Ekc6H1

Meatbodies: Meatbodies

Mikal Cronin put on some killer live shows last year surrounding MCII, but while he was singing beautifully and strumming his 12-string, another longhair consistently threatened to steal the spotlight. Chad Ubovich, the touring guitarist responsible for the huge solo on “See It My Way”, has undeniable chops. He’s also the bassist for Fuzz, and it’s the same deal—he does a lot more than just slouch in the background and play the minimum. When this dude takes a solo, you watch. Based on those sideman gigs alone, it makes sense that his band Meatbodies got picked up by In the Red for a pair of singles and a long-player.

Last year, they released a very good self-titled cassette on Ty Segall’s God? Records (as Chad and the Meatbodies). It sold out fairly quickly and, in circles that care about those sorts of things, became one of those instantaneous small batch collector’s items. But with their debut LP, it’s more difficult to view the band as small-press ass-kicking upstarts. Meatbodies was recorded and mixed by Eric “King Riff” Bauer, Bob Marshall, and Chris Woodhouse (who, between the three of them, have worked on every Live in San Francisco release and most Segall, Cronin, Fuzz, and Oh Sees records). The cover art was done by Fuzz and Slaughterhouse artist Tatiana Kartomten. Segall even plays drums and bass on a few tracks here. Meatbodies are embedded in that world, and they’re working within a formula that’s proved successful for their more-visible peers. Comparisons are inevitable; the bar is high.

Pro wrestling heels use the term “B+ player” about guys in Ubovich’s position—rookies who put on a good show but aren’t quite headliners. But he rips, you see, he’s always been a destroyer, and on Meatbodies, he also proves to be an ace rock’n’roll strategist. The tone here is set perfectly: 59 seconds of psychedelic sci-fi noise, and then, very suddenly, Ubovich and Segall come in at full power, electric guitars unrelenting, with “Disorder”. It’s a loud, exciting, kinetic, and brazen introduction. Like Daniel Bryan before him, Ubovich rises to the occasion.

But Meatbodies don’t just blindly hit peak after peak, shredding toward the high heavens uninterrupted for a full album. They pull back and indulge their more psychedelic inclinations, letting Ubovich’s voice shine, lilt, and echo over steady acoustic strumming. When that starts sounding too sterile after a couple minutes, he dirties it up by dropping an electric guitar solo in the middle. While they craft plenty of catchy hooks and choruses over the album’s dozen tracks, they don’t lean on any one thing for long. There’s always a changeup in place. They’ll dismantle a loud and fast song for a sluggish, slow finish. Any band can churn out an exciting two-minute garage punk song and then repeat the formula a few times. Very few artists of this ilk exhibit this much patience, which makes for a continually rewarding listen.

If there’s a clear-cut example of Meatbodies making the upgrade from “band with a tape and some 7″ tracks” to “rock band to watch,” it’s the re-recorded album version of “Wahoo”. The ramshackle stomper is now stadium-ready. (It’s worth checking out the original tape version of that song, too—a fun document of the band’s lo-fi, warbly beginnings.) The track comes late in the album, and when it arrives, Ubovich has already found several opportunities earlier in the LP to show off what he’s capable of as a guitarist. And sure, there’s excellent guitar work on the track, but there’s a clearer focus on the confidence he exhibits as a frontman. He yelps, screams, and croons like a seasoned rock star. “I don’t know and I don’t care,” he sings at the bridge. He does care, though—if he didn’t, Meatbodies wouldn’t sound half this good.

from Album Reviews – Pitchfork http://ift.tt/1wx16Se