Grade: B-
Given that Carrie and Corin are now in their fifties and one of them has settled down with a nice man, this is perhaps less Riot Grrl than Riot Lladies Who Lunch. You cannot expect fury to sustain itself for 30 years, not least when your band has long since ceased being an upstart revolution to the patriarchal rock order and has become instead a kind of indie heartland rock institution.
This is Sleater-Kinney’s 11th take on that curiously bloodless American version of punk, a genre which is now comfortably mainstream. They never had quite the cuteness or pop sensibilities of, say, Veruca Salt: what marked them out originally was a disinclination to compromise. They sing better than they used to and have at last arrived at the notion that a decent melody here or there might help their cause. It has indeed – this is one of their better albums, even if a significant proportion of it is boring and bombastic.
The usual sonic inferno has been grafted on to each composition – the rule of thumb is, the more studio FX is involved, the slighter the song – so we’ll pass on the opener ‘Hell’, which is about Hell and is overwrought, the mindless chug of ‘Needlessly Wild’ and take notice only when the polite, plodding pop of ‘Say It Like You Mean It’ kicks in, with its most unexpected saxophone embellishments.
They alight upon a catchy riff in ‘Hunt You Down’ and there is something very becoming about the breezy, Byrdsian chorus of ‘Don’t Feel Right’. But they have been outstripped in their marginal field – catchy punk pop sung by girls is now everywhere in the USA, and often done a lot better than this.
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