The Age: Long Article About Sleater Kinney
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Out of their comfort zone
22 January 2006
Sunday Age
First
24
After six albums, female rock trio Sleater Kinney felt they knew exactly what they were doing - so they decided to trash it all and start again. Guy Blackman reports.
Carrie Brownstein, one of US female rock trio Sleater Kinney's two singer/guitarists, started to feel strange during a show at Denver venue The Gothic in October last year. At first she was enthusiastically jumping around the stage, but by the end of the set she had to cut short her usual extended solo in Let's Call It Love, the most rock'n'roll number from Sleater Kinney's very rock'n'roll seventh album The Woods. The band finished the show, but fellow singer/guitarist Corin Tucker and drummer Janet Weiss returned to the stage for an encore without their colleague. Soon after, Brownstein had to be taken to the emergency room of a nearby hospital. Her skin was breaking out in hives, her throat swelling so that it was hard to breathe, her body temperature and blood pressure rising rapidly - and this wasn't the first time it had happened.
"It's called Exercise-Induced Anaphylaxis," the nervy, talkative Brownstein explains from her home in Portland, Oregon. "Basically you ingest something that you're allergic to, and then you exercise - or in my case play a show. It creates a reaction that's 10 times worse than if you didn't do anything. It happened twice at shows that we'd have dinner and then three hours later I'd be on stage and my head would swell up."
Brownstein received treatment and recovered quickly, but Sleater Kinney had to cancel a European tour scheduled for November while she underwent tests to get to the bottom of the problem. The first time Brownstein had this reaction was five years ago, but she had never been able to pinpoint the cause. This time the allergic response happened twice within two months, and she could remember what she had eaten both times. It turns out the singer has an allergy to soy products, and it was the tofu in a Pad Thai eaten before the Denver show that caused the extreme response.
"It's not like I just have an intolerance to soy," she stresses. "It's a pretty severe reaction. I could die!"
Sleater Kinney's live shows have always been high-energy, and the trio floored audiences during their first Australian tour in 2002, but for Brownstein to be so hyper that she induces a life-threatening allergic reaction is something else. Actually, in a strange way it's part and parcel of the new Sleater Kinney, a formerly tight, disciplined band reinvented as a snarling, primal beast. The release in May last year of The Woods announced a new, ferocious Sleater Kinney, and well over a decade after the band formed it seems that anything could happen.
It all began, bizarrely enough, with Pearl Jam.
Out of the blue, Sleater Kinney were invited by the grunge-rock behemoths to support them on an American tour starting April 2003. With dates such as Mexico City, where they played an Olympic stadium to 20,000 crazed Pearl Jam fans (the band hadn't played in Mexico since 1992), this was a very different experience for the trio, who were more used to selling out clubs with capacities around the 1000 mark.
"There's such a disparity in the size of audience," Brownstein says with obvious understatement. "And when you've been a band for many years, you rely on your own audience. You know how they react when you play certain songs, and if you're not feeling 100 per cent at a show, you can rely on their energy. But with a band like Pearl Jam, we could not rely on the audience at all. In fact, often they were working against us."
But rather than let the inattention, indifference or outright antagonism of these vast, grunge-hungry crowds intimidate them, Sleater Kinney saw their situation as a challenge, and found a way to rise to it.
"It forced us to turn inward and focus on the three of us," Brownstein says of her band, which does not have a bassist. "It forced us to prove it again onstage, which is important when you've been making your art for a certain amount of time. We had to go back to square one: 'We can play, we're worthy of you watching us for five minutes'."
And what they found was that in huge venues, in front of thousands of people who didn't know or care who they were, they could take chances that would have been unthinkable in front of their own devoted fans.
"In such big places, you want the sound to be expansive, varied, and kind of experimental," says Brownstein. "And whenever we decided to improvise, in those moments when we didn't know what was going to happen next, that's when the audience actually started paying attention to us. The experience of touring with Pearl Jam helped put us in a new mind frame."
It also brought to the surface a mounting sense of frustration with the rut Sleater Kinney had been falling into. The band had formed in Olympia, Washington in 1994, when Brownstein and Tucker became romantically involved and started Sleater Kinney as an aside to their other projects (Excuse 17 and Heavens To Betsy, respectively). Even though their relationship ended in 1996, Sleater Kinney soon became the main musical vehicle for both women, and by 2003 the band was one of the country's most popular independent groups, their sound an anthemic mixture of feminist punk and the more sweeping gestures of mainstream rock. But after six albums and almost 10 years, things were starting to become predictable.
Brownstein says she knew almost exactly what kind of riff Tucker would play over any new song she brought to the band, as well as what kind of dynamic it would have once it had been arranged. "Things start to feel easy, you feel like you have a formula that works," she says. "But once you have seven records, you can't do that one more time. We had to deconstruct everything that had become innate."
Their long-term relationship with their label also came into question. Since 1997, Sleater Kinney had been recording for Kill Rock Stars, the label famously at the centre of the early '90s Riot Grrl movement (in which Tucker and Brownstein's earlier bands had participated). Relations were still friendly with the label, but after 2002's One Beat album, Sleater Kinney knew things had to change.
"In some ways we were tired of who we were," Brownstein says. "If we were going to continue to be a band, we needed to come at it from a new perspective. We wanted to shed our expectations, all the compartments that we had put ourselves in. And we thought that working with a new set of people might aid us in attaining that.
"It's like when you're in a relationship for a really long time and you stop going out," she continues colourfully. "You just stay home and watch TV and everyone says, 'Oh they never go out! Don't even bother calling them'. We didn't want people to think of us as the couple that never leaves the house."
So that's exactly what they did. They left Kill Rock Stars for the larger Sub Pop, and came up with The Woods, an album that, while still recognisably Sleater Kinney, pushes their sound to previously unimaginable limits. Always fiery and dynamic, the band has grown savage, with producer Dave Fridmann (Mercury Rev, The Flaming Lips) helping to create a record as dark and untamed as the woods it is named after.
Another factor that contributed to the album's intensity was the grim times in which it was conceived. The US invasion of Iraq began just one month before Sleater Kinney embarked on their tour with Pearl Jam, but instead of directly addressing political issues, as did One Beat's powerful Combat Rock ("Where is the questioning, where is the protest song, since when is skepticism un-American?"), the album instead distils the essence of two years of anger and uncertainty.
"The Woods reflects chaos and uncertainty and a demystifying of the whole black-and-white dynamic," Brownstein says. "In the US, things are broken down to us, things are simplified into 'You're either with us or you're against us'. And really, what people feel is murkiness and confusion. So this record, while not being outwardly political, is definitely a reflection on political times."
Despite its troubled genesis, The Woods has obviously had a powerfully cathartic effect on the band, stripping them of their built-up frustrations and suggesting a whole new world of possibilities. And for a group whose interpersonal dynamics have always been volatile (they even attended therapy sessions in 1996 in order to continue playing together after Tucker and Brownstein's relationship ended), 2006 sees the band in a comparatively harmonious frame of mind.
"Sometimes the discord is where we come up with our best work," Brownstein says. "But we definitely know how to communicate with each other better. Corin and Janet have been a part of my life for as long as anybody, and we value our friendships. We make sure not to do anything to jeopardise that.
"It's not plain sailing," she adds, "but I'd say that it's smoother sailing."
Out of their comfort zone
22 January 2006
Sunday Age
First
24
After six albums, female rock trio Sleater Kinney felt they knew exactly what they were doing - so they decided to trash it all and start again. Guy Blackman reports.
Carrie Brownstein, one of US female rock trio Sleater Kinney's two singer/guitarists, started to feel strange during a show at Denver venue The Gothic in October last year. At first she was enthusiastically jumping around the stage, but by the end of the set she had to cut short her usual extended solo in Let's Call It Love, the most rock'n'roll number from Sleater Kinney's very rock'n'roll seventh album The Woods. The band finished the show, but fellow singer/guitarist Corin Tucker and drummer Janet Weiss returned to the stage for an encore without their colleague. Soon after, Brownstein had to be taken to the emergency room of a nearby hospital. Her skin was breaking out in hives, her throat swelling so that it was hard to breathe, her body temperature and blood pressure rising rapidly - and this wasn't the first time it had happened.
"It's called Exercise-Induced Anaphylaxis," the nervy, talkative Brownstein explains from her home in Portland, Oregon. "Basically you ingest something that you're allergic to, and then you exercise - or in my case play a show. It creates a reaction that's 10 times worse than if you didn't do anything. It happened twice at shows that we'd have dinner and then three hours later I'd be on stage and my head would swell up."
Brownstein received treatment and recovered quickly, but Sleater Kinney had to cancel a European tour scheduled for November while she underwent tests to get to the bottom of the problem. The first time Brownstein had this reaction was five years ago, but she had never been able to pinpoint the cause. This time the allergic response happened twice within two months, and she could remember what she had eaten both times. It turns out the singer has an allergy to soy products, and it was the tofu in a Pad Thai eaten before the Denver show that caused the extreme response.
"It's not like I just have an intolerance to soy," she stresses. "It's a pretty severe reaction. I could die!"
Sleater Kinney's live shows have always been high-energy, and the trio floored audiences during their first Australian tour in 2002, but for Brownstein to be so hyper that she induces a life-threatening allergic reaction is something else. Actually, in a strange way it's part and parcel of the new Sleater Kinney, a formerly tight, disciplined band reinvented as a snarling, primal beast. The release in May last year of The Woods announced a new, ferocious Sleater Kinney, and well over a decade after the band formed it seems that anything could happen.
It all began, bizarrely enough, with Pearl Jam.
Out of the blue, Sleater Kinney were invited by the grunge-rock behemoths to support them on an American tour starting April 2003. With dates such as Mexico City, where they played an Olympic stadium to 20,000 crazed Pearl Jam fans (the band hadn't played in Mexico since 1992), this was a very different experience for the trio, who were more used to selling out clubs with capacities around the 1000 mark.
"There's such a disparity in the size of audience," Brownstein says with obvious understatement. "And when you've been a band for many years, you rely on your own audience. You know how they react when you play certain songs, and if you're not feeling 100 per cent at a show, you can rely on their energy. But with a band like Pearl Jam, we could not rely on the audience at all. In fact, often they were working against us."
But rather than let the inattention, indifference or outright antagonism of these vast, grunge-hungry crowds intimidate them, Sleater Kinney saw their situation as a challenge, and found a way to rise to it.
"It forced us to turn inward and focus on the three of us," Brownstein says of her band, which does not have a bassist. "It forced us to prove it again onstage, which is important when you've been making your art for a certain amount of time. We had to go back to square one: 'We can play, we're worthy of you watching us for five minutes'."
And what they found was that in huge venues, in front of thousands of people who didn't know or care who they were, they could take chances that would have been unthinkable in front of their own devoted fans.
"In such big places, you want the sound to be expansive, varied, and kind of experimental," says Brownstein. "And whenever we decided to improvise, in those moments when we didn't know what was going to happen next, that's when the audience actually started paying attention to us. The experience of touring with Pearl Jam helped put us in a new mind frame."
It also brought to the surface a mounting sense of frustration with the rut Sleater Kinney had been falling into. The band had formed in Olympia, Washington in 1994, when Brownstein and Tucker became romantically involved and started Sleater Kinney as an aside to their other projects (Excuse 17 and Heavens To Betsy, respectively). Even though their relationship ended in 1996, Sleater Kinney soon became the main musical vehicle for both women, and by 2003 the band was one of the country's most popular independent groups, their sound an anthemic mixture of feminist punk and the more sweeping gestures of mainstream rock. But after six albums and almost 10 years, things were starting to become predictable.
Brownstein says she knew almost exactly what kind of riff Tucker would play over any new song she brought to the band, as well as what kind of dynamic it would have once it had been arranged. "Things start to feel easy, you feel like you have a formula that works," she says. "But once you have seven records, you can't do that one more time. We had to deconstruct everything that had become innate."
Their long-term relationship with their label also came into question. Since 1997, Sleater Kinney had been recording for Kill Rock Stars, the label famously at the centre of the early '90s Riot Grrl movement (in which Tucker and Brownstein's earlier bands had participated). Relations were still friendly with the label, but after 2002's One Beat album, Sleater Kinney knew things had to change.
"In some ways we were tired of who we were," Brownstein says. "If we were going to continue to be a band, we needed to come at it from a new perspective. We wanted to shed our expectations, all the compartments that we had put ourselves in. And we thought that working with a new set of people might aid us in attaining that.
"It's like when you're in a relationship for a really long time and you stop going out," she continues colourfully. "You just stay home and watch TV and everyone says, 'Oh they never go out! Don't even bother calling them'. We didn't want people to think of us as the couple that never leaves the house."
So that's exactly what they did. They left Kill Rock Stars for the larger Sub Pop, and came up with The Woods, an album that, while still recognisably Sleater Kinney, pushes their sound to previously unimaginable limits. Always fiery and dynamic, the band has grown savage, with producer Dave Fridmann (Mercury Rev, The Flaming Lips) helping to create a record as dark and untamed as the woods it is named after.
Another factor that contributed to the album's intensity was the grim times in which it was conceived. The US invasion of Iraq began just one month before Sleater Kinney embarked on their tour with Pearl Jam, but instead of directly addressing political issues, as did One Beat's powerful Combat Rock ("Where is the questioning, where is the protest song, since when is skepticism un-American?"), the album instead distils the essence of two years of anger and uncertainty.
"The Woods reflects chaos and uncertainty and a demystifying of the whole black-and-white dynamic," Brownstein says. "In the US, things are broken down to us, things are simplified into 'You're either with us or you're against us'. And really, what people feel is murkiness and confusion. So this record, while not being outwardly political, is definitely a reflection on political times."
Despite its troubled genesis, The Woods has obviously had a powerfully cathartic effect on the band, stripping them of their built-up frustrations and suggesting a whole new world of possibilities. And for a group whose interpersonal dynamics have always been volatile (they even attended therapy sessions in 1996 in order to continue playing together after Tucker and Brownstein's relationship ended), 2006 sees the band in a comparatively harmonious frame of mind.
"Sometimes the discord is where we come up with our best work," Brownstein says. "But we definitely know how to communicate with each other better. Corin and Janet have been a part of my life for as long as anybody, and we value our friendships. We make sure not to do anything to jeopardise that.
"It's not plain sailing," she adds, "but I'd say that it's smoother sailing."
Up here so high I start to shake, Up here so high the sky I scrape, I've no fear but for falling down, So look out below I am falling now, Falling down,...not staying down, Could’ve held me up, rather tear me down, Drown in the river
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Comments
cross the river to the eastside
These girls sure know how to rock w/the best of them, and I am PROUD to say that I am a fan of them! I was one of the ones who ACTUALLY knew some of the songs when they opened up for PJ. It makes me appreciate them even more!
~*STONEY PONY all the WAY!*~
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~~*~*~
"For the world, not for the war"-Neil Finn
i guess the point of this reply is to say that sleater-kinney rock, most especially on the woods.
Their performance of 'Jumpers' on Letterman (as can be seen in YouTube) is testament to that.