[滾石評] Sleater-Kinney - One Beat ****
Almost from the moment Sleater-Kinney struck their first
chord eight years ago in Olympia, Washington, the punk trio
has delivered one of the most arresting sounds in rock: a
hailstorm of chiming, percussive guitars and keening
harmonies. From the start, the band's best music was fired by
righteous outrage -- at a desiccated rock scene, at sexism,
at suffocating social conformity.
But unlike many of their Nineties indie-rock peers,
Sleater-Kinney have grown with time, and their vocabulary of
outrage has grown with them. The euphoric garage rock of
1997's Dig Me Out led to more opaque experiments on 1999's
The Hot Rock; 2000's All Hands on the Bad One at once
embraced more accessible rock and mocked it, turning pop
against itself with girlish glee.
Now, after a two-year hiatus in which guitarist Corin Tucker
had a baby, guitarist Carrie Brownstein studied
sociolinguistics and drummer Janet Weiss recorded with her
ex-husband in Quasi, the three furies return with their sixth
and most ambitious album, One Beat. Their riotous manifesto
remains the same, but their musical dialect has expanded to
include blues, soul and even traces of pristine Led
Zeppelin-era metal.
There's more than a tinge of Jimmy Page in Brownstein's
wailing guitar, particularly on "Light-Rail Coyote," a
rambunctious arena -- well, maybe gymnasium -- rock ode to
the band's new home base of Portland, Oregon. And though she
shows no aspirations to become the next Robert Plant, on One
Beat, Tucker continues to stretch her formidable voice beyond
her signature punk wails. With "Step Aside," she shakes what
her mama gave her with a blast of Sixties soul and a
power-to-the-people delivery, yowling, "This mama works till
her back is sore/But the baby's fed and the tunes are pure"
as horns blast and backup voices croon in high Motown style.
Throughout One Beat, added instruments fill out the trio's
two-guitar-and-drums, no-bass minimalism. "Funeral Song" uses
the unlikely, but hauntingly effective, combination of a
swampy blues drawl and a theremin. "Oh!" is an ebullient
pop-punk number with surf organ, hand claps and swooning
harmonies. On "Prisstina," Stephen Trask (of Hedwig and the
Angry Inch songwriting fame) embellishes the mix with
space-age analog keyboards.
"Sympathy" is the standout among the CD's twelve tracks, a
blazing blues prayer about a mother's bond with her fragile
newborn. A slide guitar moans to the beat of a lonesome
cowbell as Tucker belts her heart out like a backwater queen
fighting for her own, "naked in the face of death and life,"
and on fire with maternal passion.
In the September 11th elegy, "Far Away," rolling, harmonized
choruses lapse into stuttered verses as Tucker recalls
nursing her baby while watching "the world explode in flames"
on her TV. The title song decries growing militarism as
staccato vocals paint a world where "All that's on the
surface/Are bloody arms and oil fields." "Step Aside" offers
a directive against apathy: "When violence rules the world
outside/And the headlines make me want to cry/It's not the
time to just keep quiet/Speak up one time to the beat."
With One Beat, S-K remind the moshing masses that punk spirit
requires more than three-chord synchronicity. It needs hot
water to thrive and a restless compulsion to push musical and
political envelopes. Whether whupping their axes or singing
the blues, the women of Sleater-Kinney are always pushing
punk to the boiling point.
NEVA CHONIN
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