Review: HOT Sleater-Kinney Philly show ...

blacknapkins · August 2006

Sleater-Kinney's last Phila. gig is hot all around

By Keith Harris
For The Inquirer

Monday night was Sleater-Kinney's last show ever in Philadelphia, and it was hot. So hot that you could see the air in the Starlight Ballroom. So hot that the humidity wrinkled your fingers.

So hot that just two songs in, singer-guitarist Carrie Brownstein had already noted her "slippery fretboard," warning that the show would be "loose." So hot that, by the encore, Brownstein said she could recall just one other night in the trio's 11-year career so "stagnant and sweaty."

But the air was the only thing stagnant. True, the band sometimes strained to reach the transcendent moments that it casually leapfrogs to on a good night. Then again, this was a victory lap.

Originally sprouting from the Northwest-based riot-grrrl movement, a mash-up of punk-rock and feminist politics, Sleater-Kinney has since become rock's greatest existing power trio. The band now plays just three more shows on the road before wrapping up its career at a two-show Portland, Ore., homestand.

And it sure was "loose," though not in a bad way. Typically, a Sleater-Kinney song punctuates jagged, carefully interlocking drum and guitar parts with one of three incendiary elements - singer-guitarist Corin Tucker's powerhouse shriek, Janet Weiss' machine-gun drum fills, and Brownstein's bursts of guitar squall.

At peak performance, the trio detonates with an unerring precision that's equal parts calculation and spontaneity. On Monday night, the effect was more ferociously haphazard, like a footrace in a minefield.

For a band prepared to call it quits, though, Sleater-Kinney was hardly nostalgic. The musicians drew the bulk of their set from their most recent album, 2005's jammier, almost metallic departure, The Woods. In fact, they seemed the most like themselves when they stretched out, as on "Let's Call It Love," their almost-bluesy assault on the classic rock canon.

The song's orgasmic midsection is straight out of the Led Zeppelin playbook. The extended Brownstein solo into which it crashes is Hendrix filtered through a punk sensibility, and the closing instrumental interplay suggests what could have been, had the members of Cream been able to sacrifice their egotism for the sake of their art.

The encore was time, of course, to haul out the old stuff, which still sounded great. But when the band reached all the way back to 1996 for "I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone," you could hear why it had focused on the present. Yelped with gusto by Tucker and Brownstein, the song remains a genuine punk anthem. And yet, compared to what Sleater-Kinney had accomplished in the decade since writing it, on Monday night, its youthful rock ambitions sounded cutely naïve.