Exhume Your Idols: The Return of Sleater-Kinney

Photo By: Brigette Sire
Janet Weiss, Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker. Photo By: Brigette Sire

“Did you see what I put on Instagram?” Carrie Brownstein asks the table at the Observatory, a homey bistro in Portland’s Montavilla neighborhood, where she and her once-again bandmates, drummer Janet Weiss and singer-guitarist Corin Tucker, are grabbing lunch. It’s three days after Christmas, and the women of Sleater-Kinney haven’t seen each other since splitting for the holidays. In six weeks, they will embark on their first tour together in nine years, which they’ve been rehearsing for at Brownstein’s house, the same place they wrote No Cities To Love, their first album in a decade. The Instagram post in question is a video taken in her living room during a recent practice session. Through the walls, the band can be heard barreling through “Entertain,” an eruptive track from 2005 swan-song The Woods. As guitars, drums and Tucker’s distinctive wail tangle into a muffled roar, Brownstein’s two dogs, Toby and Cricket, sprawl out on a couch, looking thoroughly unentertained.

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“The enthusiasm in this video is overwhelming,” reads the caption, dripping with the drollness familiar to fans of Portlandia, the sketch comedy show that, in the time since she last stood onstage with Weiss and Tucker, has transformed Brownstein into an unlikely TV star.

Canine disaffection aside, for plenty of human beings, the return of Sleater-Kinney is a major cause for excitement. In its initial 12-year run, the band cultivated one of the most worshipful followings in all of indie-rock. It personalized the politics of riot grrrl, writing about relationships, abuses of authority, cultural patriarchy and the band itself through a fiercely feminist lens, downplaying polemics and slogans in favor of real-life tales of heartbreak and resolve. Over the course of seven acclaimed albums, their music – a brand of guitar-and-drum rock (no bass needed) that always sounded bigger than the sum of its three parts – grew increasingly ambitious, daring and singularly their own. When the group went on “indefinite hiatus” in 2006, Rolling Stone mourned the loss of “America’s best punk band,” an echo of a less-qualified superlative bestowed upon them a few years earlier by the legendary critic Greil Marcus, who called Sleater-Kinney the best band in the world, period. At their final shows, many in the crowd wept.

“There was this notion that this whole era was ending,” says journalist Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, who wrote about the band’s last days for Pitchfork. “It wasn’t just them. It was signaling the real, real end of riot grrrl.”

And so, to have Sleater-Kinney back means something more than just being able to hear some great songs played live again – it represents a resurrection of the principles that defined a generation of underground music. But nine years is a long time. A lot has changed, both within the group and in the culture at large. Can a once-egalitarian trio function the same now that one of them is a bonafide celebrity? In the age of hip-hop and EDM, can a band that once sang about the power of words and guitar matter as much as it once did? Is it possible for any band to meet expectations when shouldering not just its own significant legacy but the weight of an entire movement?

A month and a half before their first shows, Brownstein, Tucker and Weiss hardly seem troubled by these questions. That’s probably because they’ve already recorded the answer. Released in late January, No Cities To Love isn’t “a solid effort,” “a pleasant surprise” or any of the other soft platitudes typically ascribed to reunion albums. It’s tempting to say the band picks up where it left off, but that wouldn’t be true, either. Instead, Sleater-Kinney has come back as its evolutionary self. This is the record it would’ve arrived at without the decade-long pause. Its 10 songs are as tightly constructed and ferociously performed as anything in their catalog, exuding neither the desperation for relevance nor a complacency to lean on the past. It is an affirmation of everything the band ever stood for, while also proclaiming where the band stands right now, as women in their early 40s whose concerns go beyond any scene or movement. It is an album whose relevancy is earned just by being really damn good.

All that’s left now is to go out and prove it onstage. And there’s little question about their ability to do that – hard-to-please pets be damned.

“We’re ready,” Weiss says. “We hope other people are, too.”

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If No Cities To Love sounds like the work of a band that never broke up, that’s partially because, during their hiatus, the members of Sleater-Kinney didn’t drift far from each other’s lives. Tucker and Brownstein, who started Sleater-Kinney as students at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, taking the name from the freeway exit leading to their practice space, remained close friends. Brownstein and Weiss, along with Helium and Ex-Hex’s Mary Timony, formed Wild Flag in 2009, releasing one great album of kinetic garage rock. In Portland, where the group relocated in the early 2000s, it wasn’t uncommon to see some combination of the three out at a show, or destroying the competition in a ping-pong tournament.

It was never that they needed time away from each other. What they needed was a break from Sleater-Kinney.

“The band had become really stressful for each of us, for different reasons,” Weiss says. “It became a real handful to manage the band the way we wanted to do it and our lives the way we wanted to do that. I feel like when we play in this band, we have to give a lot of ourselves to it, and dedicate a certain amount of emotional intensity to it. After the cycle of touring-record, touring-record, it became really exhausting.”

By 2005, Sleater-Kinney hadn’t exactly become a big business, but it was certainly a big deal. Each album, beginning with 1997’s Dig Me Out, its first with Weiss in the drum throne, was critically fawned over, and each sold enough to top the college charts. With every record, the band advanced past its early monochromatic Sonic Youthisms, moving toward a brighter, more melodic and simultaneously more complex sound, arguably reaching its apex with 2002’s One Beat. Brownstein and Tucker’s guitar interplay, always the group’s key ingredient, achieved new levels of furious intricacy, while the songs, written in the direct aftermath of both September 11 and the birth of Tucker’s first child, railed against the world that seemed to be crumbling around them. It was a powerful statement of protest at a time when much of the country was still in a flag-waving daze, earning their best reviews and biggest tour yet, opening for Pearl Jam.

But still, they demanded more. For The Woods, the band left its longtime label, Kill Rock Stars, for Sub Pop, hired super producer David Fridmann, decamped to upstate New York and pumped up the volume. Sleater-Kinney always enjoyed subverting classic-rock machismo – see Brownstein’s onstage Pete Townshend windmills and Dave Lee Roth high-kicks – but now, they were throwing down the Hammer of the Gods with in-the-red abandon; Tucker’s Ann Wilson-gone-punk power-wail had never been better employed. It was their biggest, loudest album to date, and by all accounts, it took a lot out of them. It was a grueling recording process, which carried over into an especially grueling tour. Tucker was struggling being away from her son, Marshall, then five years old. Brownstein was suffering frequent panic attacks. Going into the final dates, the band issued a statement, thanking the fans and declaring that “as of now, there are no plans for future tours or recording.” At their two-night farewell, at Portland’s Crystal Ballroom, Eddie Vedder opened for them.

“It’s sad to say goodbye to something that’s been so fulfilling and nourished us in a lot ways, but it seemed like the right thing to do,” Weiss says. “I don’t think there was any choice, really.”

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