Sleater-Kinney All Hands on the Bad One (Kill Rock Stars)
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With their debut EP, Sleater-Kinney, and their first LP, Call the Doctor, Sleater-Kinney had already established themselves as major players in the northwestern punk scene when Dig Me Out was released. But Dig Me Out blew them up bigger than that world. It fleshed out ideas only hinted at on Call the Doctor. The band used its quirky lineup–drums, two guitars, no bass–to the fullest, pitting lines of equal weight against each other to create a complex, layered dynamic that retained the energy of the riot-girl movement. That interplay was mirrored in the vocals of Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein: Tucker’s soaring, operatic voice seemed like a tough one to counter, but Brownstein’s sing-scream-speak did the trick, and the two used this counterpoint technique to accent themes in the lyrics. Solidifying their syncopated interplay this time around was a better drummer, Janet Weiss.
It was intoxicating, and the critics wanted desperately for it to be the next big something–a concept they could grasp. “[Tucker’s] voice is enormous, with a natural swing–the sort of swing that neither Tina Turner nor Mick Jagger ever had, the ability to take a note and ring it like a bell in a tower,” Marcus wrote in the Esquire piece. But no matter how many bloated rock ‘n’ rollers Marcus and his ilk compared them to, Sleater-Kinney weren’t the next anything. They seemed mostly to want to keep on being themselves. This moderate ambition became evident in the two years before the release of The Hot Rock, when they saw their star rise higher than almost any independent band’s before them–and saw the darker side of stardom as their personal lives were poked and prodded by the press. (In 1997 Spin revealed, against the band’s wishes, that Tucker and Brownstein had had a brief romantic relationship at one point; the gossip was repeated in article after article.) The media attention brought major labels a-calling with suitcases of money in tow. But the band decided to stay on the Olympia indie Kill Rock Stars–a choice Jagger or Turner, who’ve been gouging fans with higher and higher ticket prices in recent years, would certainly never make.
Both The Hot Rock and All Hands on the Bad One can be read as responses to media attention, but the new one deals with the glare by staring straight back into it. “Was It a Lie,” ostensibly about a woman hit by a train, twists the gruesome tale into a condemnation of sensationalism: “A woman’s pain never private, always seen / I want to close my eyes / I want to cut the wires / I want a day not made for you to see.” And where Dig Me Out closed with “Jenny,” a tearful but straightforward ode to a lost lover, All Hands on the Bad One wraps up with “The Swimmer,” in which Tucker takes just 14 lines of efficient poetry to convey what it’s like to suffer personal loss while living in the public eye. “I can hardly see you now / Are you getting closer and / Do you know you’re the one? / They will never understand / How washed up you feel on land / The spotlight of the sun, it shines on.”
