Pain and its many faces: The indie rockers throw themselves into the arms of the listeners.
Grief, anger and despair do not necessarily have to sound like there should be a tissue within reach. Even the biggest drama can make your hips swing. Best example: “Dance This Mess Around” by the B-52’s: Cindy Wilson asks with the greatest possible pain “Why don’t you dance with me?”, the band plays a song exactly at the interface between party and sadness – Dance the Borderline!
Second best example: “Say It Like You Mean It.” Sleater-Kinney borrowed the beat from the B-52’s, the song about it is unique and one of the best in the 30-year career of this wonderful band. According to the story, there was a brief period of stress in the studio because producer John Congleton – a Grammy winner for his work with St. Vincent – suggested to Corin Tucker that she had to re-record the song again or she would be wasting its potential. Tucker raged inside, slept on it one night, redid the vocals – and now has that urgency in his voice that makes this piece so incredibly good.
And the album too. LITTLE ROPE follows the fatal accident of Corrie Brownstein’s mother and stepfather. The sudden death of their parents turns certainties on their head, and Sleater-Kinney responds to this with songs that are about loneliness and throw themselves into the arms of those who listen. Sometimes noisy, like “Six Mistakes”, sometimes bouncy, like “Crusader”, sometimes with a grand gesture: “Untidy Creature” is the reinvention of the power ballad in the Sleater-Kinney cosmos.