Skip to main content

Sleater-Kinney – Little Rope

4 stars

 Opening an album with a track called ‘Hell’ is something of a gauntlet-slapping giveaway of things to come on Sleater-Kinney’s eleventh album, their fourth studio outing since Carrie Brownstein, Corin Tucker and drummer Janet Weiss reunited in 2014. With Weiss departing in 2019, Brownstein and Tucker may no longer be the punky upstarts of yore, but their confessional meditations on loss, grief, confusion and crisis are  born from hard lived experience.

 

This is certainly the case on ‘Little Rope’, recorded in the shadow of the deaths of Brownstein’s parents in a car crash. While much of the album was written before the accident, it nevertheless gives the record its emotional heart. Like Tucker sings on ‘Hunt You Down’, ‘the thing you fear the most will hunt you down’.

 

Despite this, ‘Little Rope’ isn’t the unfettered howl one might expect. Rather, the pain has been channelled into a well-crafted and eminently grown-up collection tinged with depth and nuance. That’s not to say any edges have been blunted. Producer John Congleton wraps things in a dense and crunchy sheen, but the rawness and vulnerability remain across the record’s ten tracks.

 

Second single, ‘Say it Like You Mean it’, is a last gasp challenge to a departing lover that is both defiant and redemptive. It is also a great pop song. As too is the stadium sized bounce of ‘Crusader’. Most affecting moment of all comes on ‘Dress Yourself’, a spiky nouveau power ballad and cracked anthem in waiting for disaffected middle youth trying to keep it together.

 

The artistry that pervades beyond the record’s troubled pulse is itself a form of redemption, as Brownstein and Tucker try to make sense of the world on a record full of scars that sounds like a purging.

 

Little Rope is released on 19thJanuary on Loma Vista Records


The List, December 2023

 

ends

 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...

Myra Mcfadyen - An Obituary

Myra McFadyen – Actress   Born January 12th 1956; died October 18th 2024   Myra McFadyen, who has died aged 68, was an actress who brought a mercurial mix of lightness and depth to her work on stage and screen. Playwright and artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, David Greig, called McFadyen “an utterly transformative, shamanic actor who could change a room and command an audience with a blink”. Citizens’ Theatre artistic director Dominic Hill described McFadyen’s portrayal of Puck in his 2019 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in London as “funny, mischievous and ultimately heartbreaking.”   For many, McFadyen will be most recognisable from Mamma Mia!, the smash hit musical based around ABBA songs. McFadyen spent two years on the West End in Phyllida Lloyd’s original 1999 stage production, and was in both film offshoots. Other big screen turns included Rob Roy (1995) and Our Ladies (2019), both directed by Mi...

The Passage – Hip Rebel Degenerates: Black, White and Red All Over

Prelude – The Power of Three   Fear. Power. Love. This life-and-death (un)holy trinity was the driving force and raisons d’être of The Passage, the still largely unsung Manchester band sired in what we now call the post-punk era, and who between 1978 and 1983 released four albums and a handful of singles.    Led primarily by composer Dick Witts, The Passage bridged the divide between contemporary classical composition and electronic pop as much as between the personal and the political. In the oppositional hotbed of Margaret Thatcher’s first landslide, The Passage fused agit-prop and angst, and released a song called Troops Out as a single. The song offered unequivocal support for withdrawing British troops from Northern Ireland.    They wrote Anderton’s Hall, about Greater Manchester’s born again right wing police chief, James Anderton, and, on Dark Times, rubbed Brechtian polemic up against dancefloor hedonism. On XOYO, their most commercial and potentially mo...