Sleater-Kinney
One Beat  (Kill Rock Stars)
by Marc Hirsh

originally published in Space City Rock, Fall 2002

In the recent media frenzy surrounding the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Elvis Presley, ABC News ran a puff piece on the state of rock ‘n’ roll since the advent of the King. In chronicling the fallout, they showed clips of exactly four other artists: the unavoidable Beatles, the ludicrously outclassed Kiss, the inexorable Rolling Stones and, unnamed but represented by a reasonable portion of their video for “You’re No Rock n’ Roll Fun,” Sleater-Kinney. While it would be preposterous to follow the implicit argument here and suggest that nothing else of importance has come about since the late 1970s, the point is well-taken. If you’re looking for a bead on what rock ‘n’ roll as it exists today is capable of, your search should begin, and may well end, with Sleater-Kinney.

That’s an increasingly common belief. Entertainment Weekly asked if they were America’s greatest rock ‘n’ roll band, Time answered in the affirmative and Robert Christgau of The Village Voice suggested in his review of 2000’s peerless All Hands On The Bad One that Sleater-Kinney demonstrated the consistency and quality of the Rolling Stones during their late-’60s peak. With critics tumbling over themselves to coin new superlatives and a devoted fanbase to sustain them, what to do for an encore? The answer is not much, and everything. One Beat shows Sleater-Kinney refusing to panic in the face of outsized and unmeetable expectations while very quietly expanding their sonic palette. They’re still Carrie, Corin and Janet, guitar/guitar/drums, but instruments which may have punctuated previous albums take on a more crucial role. There’s no glockenspiel song on One Beat, sad to report, but horns, theremin and keyboards (especially keyboards) all take their turn and drive some of the songs in ways unprecedented in the band’s catalog. The album is unmistakably Sleater-Kinney while sounding almost nothing like its predecessors.

More than anything, One Beat is the sound of a band that is so clearly at the top of their game that they can experiment, and stumble, and still come up aces. Songs with lackluster verses, such as “Far Away” and “Light Rail Coyote,” shift into hurtling choruses that easily redeem them without even trying. The lyrics are, surprisingly for a Sleater-Kinney album, hit-or-miss, less evocative and more descriptive than the band’s previous work. Even so, the worst that can be said about them is that they condemn the occasional song to modest disposability. Less troublesome is a new tendency to mine the past for musical ideas, since even when their influences are clear and present, Sleater-Kinney’s instincts lead them to assimilation and transformation rather than recapitulation. “Combat Rock” owes itself to the Clash in ways both obvious (need I?) and not (the beat’s Caribbean foundation, the tenor of the vocal delivery, the politicized lyric) without, ultimately, sounding a thing like them; the song’s warbly keyboard skitters over a groove that uses the components of reggae but, again, doesn’t quite fit the category. “Step Aside,” meanwhile, is crammed to the gills with ’60s tropes, with horns and handclaps, woo-hoo-hoos and a wah-wah that you sense before you actually hear it, a call-out to the band to keep it up and a Motown drumbeat that’s their most twistworthy since Dig Me Out ’s “Turn It On.” Yet it sounds utterly now, as modern today as its component songs sounded in 1967.

That same avoidance of slavish imitation holds true for what should be the band’s biggest and most unavoidable influence: Sleater-Kinney themselves. Tracks that by objective observation should be considered standard S-K songs easily avoid the trap of redundancy. The opening “One Beat” shudders along on Janet Weiss’s thudding drums, with the interlocking guitars of Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein dueling as in The Hot Rock ’s “The End of You.” The song is all rhythm, though, with Tucker and Brownstein’s guitars supporting the beat rather than vice versa; even for a band that allows their drummer to do more than simply count to four, it’s a substantial risk, but it pays off, twitching with tension. That song’s flip side is “O₂,” which is so propulsive that it may as well leave a trail of smoke and fire across the sky. It is nothing but pure, unadulterated release from start to finish, and when the vocal multiplies to holler “I wanna run away/I wanna get away” for a third and final time, the astonishing fact is that Sleater-Kinney, after spending most of the song at a level that most bands would be hard-pressed to achieve in the first place, let alone maintain, have somehow managed to find yet more reserves from which to draw. And they seem to know it, having scattered One Beat with moments where they simply revel in their power: offering themselves as an alternative to “the big so-so” in “Oh!,” with the clarion call of its opening guitars and a keyboard hook in the chorus that sends me into ecstatic bliss; the demand to dance in the face of global uncertainty that is “Step Aside,” the title of which is a warning to anybody who gets in their way; and the big, fake, superb goodnight-Cleveland bash-out that concludes “Hollywood Ending.”

Even the political bent of the album seems both a natural extension of and a new expansion on previous themes, although Sleater-Kinney may not have really had a choice. Right in the middle of a long (for them) two-year hiatus, everybody’s world changed, and it dramatically affected the album on which they were working. “Step Aside” is clearly informed by recent history, which is also implicit in “Sympathy,” but it’s “Far Away” that directly reacts to the events of September 11^th, from the anxious telephone pleas to turn on the TV to the fear of even going outside. It is, in all truthfulness, a tad clumsy, more like an outline for a lyric than the lyric itself. Then a chorus of sorts kicks in, the band drops their measured response and everything comes pouring out as they howl, confused and noncomprehending, a question written in all caps in the CD booklet: “WHY CAN’T I GET ALONG WITH YOU?” If you weren’t paying attention before, it snaps you into focus. The subsequent shift in the nation’s political and discursive climate is addressed in “Combat Rock,” which fiercely takes the ruling administration’s jingoistic responses and recommendations to task (whereas “Far Away” merely skewers the president for cowardice). Brownstein sings it with a high sarcasm delivered through a smile that sounds as though it’s composed of nothing but shadows and teeth.

Despite Brownstein’s increasingly visible role, taking on truly lead vocals for more songs than in the past, One Beat seems paradoxically like Tucker’s baby. That might simply be a result of Tucker’s literal baby, who makes appearances in “Far Away” and “Step Aside” and is the subject of the closing “Sympathy” (and the sweet and lovely “Lions and Tigers,” one of two songs on a well-worth-it bonus EP included with early editions of One Beat). A declaration of Tucker’s all-consuming love and devotion and supplication to young Marshall in the guise of a prayer, the song could be cloying. Instead, it’s devastating. Tucker doesn’t just tell us how much she desperately loves her son, she makes it clear with every puff of air that escapes her lips. Sleater-Kinney aren’t the first to tackle this topic; Liz Phair celebrated her child on the title track to 1998’s whitechocolatespacegg and Chrissie Hynde acknowledged the same on 1983’s “Middle Of The Road” (and even further back, depending on how literally you choose to interpret “Kid”), but Tucker’s fear and love and determination to bring her boy up in a beautiful world (with Aunts Carrie and Janet standing steadfast by her side) trumps them all. If you’d suggested 45 years ago that it would be possible to make not merely viable but transcendent rock ‘n’ roll about a mother asking God to keep her baby boy from harm, you’d’ve been laughed out of the sock hop. The times they are a-changin’. The first great band of the 21^st century welcomes you.

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