Sleater-Kinney: The Hot Rock : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

In a lean time for american rock bands, Sleater-Kinney show how you can thrive by staying on your toes and calling your own shots. This Olympia, Washington, trio won legions of loyal fans with two of the decade's finest albums, 1996's Call the Doctor and 1997's Dig Me Out, bringing the femme-punk noise with guitars from The Clash and vocals from The Craft. But they take chances with their sound on The Hot Rock, named after a bitchin' Robert Redford jewel-heist movie. Only the opener, "Start Together," goes for the anthemic yowl of Dig Me Out; the overall mood and tempo are downbeat, with a heavy aura of New Wave Eurogloom. The band has obviously been listening to its old New Order records -- "A Quarter to Three" could be a Low-life outtake, while "Get Up" sounds like an even groovier outtake from Power, Corruption and Lies.

Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein trade vocals over their slithery guitar riffs, and drummer Janet Weiss never lets them hit the ground. The expansive new sound gives Sleater-Kinney room to experiment with their Husker Du-style storytelling. They score biggest with "The Size of Our Love," a ballad about two young lovers in trouble -- a woman dying and a man getting left behind (compare the similar "Jenny," Dig Me Out's only false note, for a sense of how Sleater-Kinney are growing as songwriters). Brownstein hits the painfully pretty melody sideways, tossing off rhymes like "This hospital room/You're my hospital groom." The offhand narrative keeps it real, depicting devotion and despair without slipping into morbid schmaltz or irony. No other band could have made this song hit home -- not even Sleater-Kinney, until now. They've earned the right to keep reinventing themselves; more than any other current rock & roll band, Sleater-Kinney make you feel like a fool for trying to guess their next move. As The Hot Rock proves, these brilliant punk pranksters can end up anywhere they like.