RAW POWER LIVES
Sleater-Kinney's live show hits the jugular
By: Lizz Mendez Berry

Last year Sleater-Kinney played in a basement club in Glasgow. There was no stage, just 100 kids desperately seeking saucy sounds. Guitarists Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker and drummer Janet Weiss obliged them with sharp, hot rock'n'roll. Brownstein punctuated her playing with kung-fu kicks, Weiss attacked her drum kit with tightly controlled fury and Tucker let her voice do the talking. Yes, Sleater-Kinney rock, but the reason they hit the jugular so hard is because propulsive motion and poetic emotion collide perfectly in their music. Tucker's raw-like-sushi voice walks along the ragged edges of experience. She aches, she struts with bittersweet partner in crime Brownstien - and she does not calm down. Her desperation and elation establish full contact with the listener, and when Sleater-Kinney play, both fans and the band are bathed in this superkinetic experience. "Playing live gives us the chance to feed off the fans and reinvent the songs that we've created," weiss explains. "We really rock, and our band is more cohesive now," said Tucker at the Glasgow show. "It's so much fun to get up and play. We like people to have access to us, live and direct." Over the past few years Sleater-Kinney have become relative media superstars, garnering critical acclaim because they make live-wired music and because they fir into facile women-in-rock categories. But they still make their music on a grassroots level, working with an independent label, Kill Rock Stars. Says Weiss, "Ultimately, our records are a snapshot of where we're at at the moment. We make them to please ourselves, because they are a reflection of us. You can't care about the critics even though sometimes the pressure of people's expectations can be stressful." Dig Me Out (1997), Sleater-Kinney's third full-length album, was a collage of searing punk-pop songs -- each tune a perfectly constructed capsule, swallowed in two-and-a-half minutes. By contrast, their new record, The Hot Rock, feels more splintered. Their sound has always been astoundingly complex for its minimalist combination of two guitars and a drum kit, but whereas on Dig Me Out each track felt precise and self-contained, The Hot Rock seems less resolved, recalling some of the rawness of their second album, Call the Doctor. The tracks feel open-ended: the guitars meander, bleeding into one another and the melody instead of delivering fast, direct strikes. The dialogue between Tucker and Brownstein's voices is also more pronounced. In the past, Tucker dominated the melodies, while Brownstein tended to do the choruses. On The Hot Rock, their voices overlap more. They're exploring the same thematic territory, but from diverging perspectives. According to Weiss, "This record is the most lyrically complex. Corin and Carrie talk about the same things in two different languages. "This record is not a huge departure, but it does show progressions," she adds. "It is more musically complex. Working with Roger Moutenot [known for his work with Yo La Tengo] catalyzed a different sound for us. It wasn't that we were sick of working with John Goodmanson [who produced their other records], but we wanted to experiment with a different collaborator and see how that affected out work." The band creates the music together, with each member involved in the songwriting process. According to Weiss, "Usually, one of us will have an idea or a fragment, and the rest of us will work off that. We take it in completely different directions. Everyone is involved." "We are a band, and that's important to us."