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 s
An archive of arts writing by Neil Cooper. Effete No Obstacle.