Some bands are just bands. Most of the good ones, however, represent something beyond a unit that plays some tunes. They become an anchor point for a swirl of stances and meanings.
The five women on the stage who make up Sleater-Kinney Mk III – two core members at the front, three touring members at the rear – are surrounded by vertical light rods, just one aspect of a dazzling visual spectacle that ups the game of this fascinating band. In their time together, Sleater-Kinney have themselves acted as lightning rods for all sorts of energies.
Late-90s devotees of angular post-punk when the sound was not fashionable, they flew the flag for art-rock. Not only were Sleater-Kinney all-female, they were all-feminist – emissaries of the post-riot grrrl underground, good enough to put a boot up on to the monitors of the mainstream.
The two singing guitarists were briefly a couple. In one of them, Carrie Brownstein, now best known as the co-creator of US TV’s Portlandia, the band had a sharp, swaggering, American guitar hero. (Tonight, Brownstein runs the gamut of kicks, toe-heel crab walks and head bangs, her guitar-playing rich and lean.) Emotions justly ran high about this left-field, queer-positive sisterhood who rocked.
After their nine-year hiatus – perhaps especially after their nine-year hiatus – those feelings continued to swirl as a new generation embraced them. By coming back, Sleater-Kinney were also now facing down ageism, on top of everything else. But last year was arguably the year that Sleater-Kinney became something even more than a Portland-based repository of emotional investments. This latest iteration of the band is just a beast: loud, intense, layered, slick, sleek, unapologetic, professional. So many words that conjure force and impact are gendered male; bands such as Sleater-Kinney demand new ones. This band are not just “words and guitar” and solidarity any more: they are a powerhouse and a spectacle.
You know things are really not as they were when the fourth song in – The Future Is Here – starts with two keyboards and a beat, courtesy of multi-instrumentalists Katie Harkin and Toko Yasuda – rather than a needling two-guitar dialogue between the principals. But some songs tonight have as many as four guitars, putting paid to the lean and hungry punk-trio stereotype. Cabinets to the rear of this dramatically lit stage house still silhouettes – stylised wolves, imploring hands – from the band’s recent videos, animations in the style of old Czech stop-motion fairytales.
This Sleater-Kinney are less a feminist retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, however, and much more wolf. “Cuz I’m feeling like an animal!” confirms Corin Tucker, on a new song called Animal, towards the tail end of a 27-song set.
A hydraulic clank and a call-and-response refrain open this all-change gig with the title track of their most recent album. Tucker’s wail that “the centre won’t hold” makes reference not only to WB Yeats’s first world war-era truism, “things fall apart, the centre cannot hold”, but to the immolation of old political certainties of more recent times and, finally, to the band’s own recent restructuring.
You could argue that Sleater-Kinney truly became a band when they did the most pedestrian, cliched, band-like thing imaginable: they got rid of their drummer.
In formulating their ninth album, The Center Won’t Hold, the trio of Brownstein, Tucker and drummer Janet Weiss hired a super-producer with strong production ideas: a George Martin figure. So profound was the influence of Annie “St Vincent” Clark that Sleater-Kinney had to undergo band therapy. (Metallica did the same on Some Kind of Monster.) Weiss eventually left, as she tells it, when it became clear that she was being demoted to mere time-keeper. The sisterhood was ruptured – by no less a rock cliche than musical differences.
After a traumatic car crash, Weiss is now musically active once again in her other excellent band, Quasi, who are touring in the US. And Sleater-Kinney now have a new drummer, Angie Boylan. The world is now so full of cognitive dissonance that tonight, it is possible both to miss Weiss and to give Boylan her due. Boylan performs the miracle of being neither too showily different, nor too meekly anonymous a replacement.
Most of Sleater-Kinney’s new songs sound clear and true, and the enhanced treatment of the older tracks impresses, rather than depresses. No, they don’t play their old rallying cry, Words and Guitar. (They do perform another pivotal oldie, the glorious One More Hour, as a three-piece.)
Yes, the influence of Clark is audible in the sophisticated sound design, which is louche, lurid and exhilarating by turns. Brownstein’s closing clangs of guitar become thrumming segues; there are frequent electronic throbs of menace.
There are, perhaps, a few too many similar mid-period songs that now sound excessively gnarly. But the biggest gain is clarity. The Dog/The Body, sung by Brownstein, is a new-model Sleater-Kinney anthem, a singalong chorus so shamelessly pop you have to laugh, even though the song is about feeling defeated. Broken, meanwhile, starts the encore with just Brownstein and Tucker on stage, Brownstein playing piano while Tucker sings.
It’s a riveting moment, Tucker’s suddenly conventional voice aching over the sexual assault testimony of Christine Blasey Ford in the hearings that confirmed Brett Kavanaugh as a US supreme court appointee. Tucker moves to the front of the stage, a raised fist in the air.
Love, the song about Brownstein and Tucker’s ongoing professional relationship, seemed a little tacky when it was first released in the wake of Weiss’s departure. Tonight, it’s all love: just another great new song. Brownstein leans into Tucker, and bows to her; Tucker grins at her, setting up guitar lines for Brownstein to finish.
Much as Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme beefed up a scrawny, but willing Arctic Monkeys just over a decade ago, then, the musical progression here is entirely logical. If some of these songs sound a little like forgotten tunes of the early 80s, that’s no accident. The band actually cover Gloria, by Laura Branigan, a 1982 track full of synth stabs that was slyly exceptional for the time: a song about a woman sung by another woman. (“It’s not the Gloria you were expecting,” quips Brownstein, by way of introduction.)
The best song of the night is Can I Go on, a defiant pop song that wonders: “Maybe I’m not sure I wanna go on.” This new sound points Sleater-Kinney relentlessly forwards.
