All Our Little Wishes Have Run Dry

Oh, bless you, Matthew. I’m so thrilled to FINALLY hear someone call One Beat out for the dud of an album that it is. When The Woods started getting all these rave reviews, I found that everyone who loved it also loved One Beat, so I didn’t feel the need to give The Woods much of a chance. Reading that there’s someone else out there whose opinion I respect who likes this new one but didn’t like One Beat inspires me to pick up the new album, since I figured that One Beat would put me off of Sleater-Kinney for good. And I loved both The Hot Rock and All Hands.

Good news. Thanks.

i don’t think S-K are confused about their strengths as much as they have two very different sounds now - the new and the old, both strong - and it’s difficult to reconcile them on stage. i agree that ‘the woods’ is not as massive a departure as some say, but the guitar sounds/tunings/effects are still quite different. i think that’s why some of the old songs last night - “one more hour” and “light rail coyote” especially - never seemed to gel.

so though i was bummed that they completely avoided ‘the hot rock’ and ‘call the doctor’ (my two faves of the older stuff), i kinda understood it and didn’t mind. i think the new stuff sounded great live (only “steep air” bored me). they definitely seem a band in transition, but i’m more excited by that than frustrated.

and yeah, “sympathy” was amazing last night.

As for One Beat - I really love “Sympathy,” “Oh!,” “Step Aside,” and the title track. As you can probably gleen from this post, “Sympathy” is actually one of my top favorites in their catalog, definitely top ten if I had to make the list. The rest of the record ranges from so-so to outright obnoxious (”Combat Rock,” “Far Away”).

Ha, we’re on opposite ends - out of all the times I’ve seen them, I’ve only seen them play “Get Up” on the Hot Rock tour, and “Joey Ramone” way too many times to get excited about it.

funny, the only SK album I own is The Hot Rock, and that’s all I’ve ever heard except for these new tracks.
I like it, although I could also do without the “this retro is cool, but that other retro isn’t” hypocrisy. it certainly doesn’t sound as unique as THR stuff, although it’s got their imprint.

I had never heard that Thompson song before either, it’s great.

i thought the Danzig cover was hilarious, i don’t think you can fault sleater-kinney for wanting to stick to their newer stuff, and yes, sympathy was effing ineffable. But i think you err in several important respects. 1)I love the Hot Rock dearly, but while it’s certainly more subtle melodically to the Woods’s skronky explosions of rage and disillusionment, i think lyrically and thematically The Woods is a far more mature, subtle, and poignant record, in some respects, than the Hot Rock, whether you’re talking about the exploration of the failure of bourgeois urbanist utopianism in “The Wilderness,” the unsettling politics of commodity and the emotion of simulacra in “Modern Girl,” or the suicide feminism of “Jumpers.”

I don’t think The Woods is a retro gesture and i certainly don’t think S-K are hypocrites. “Entertain” isn’t critiquing Interpol/The Killers/The Strokes/every other crappy pretentious post-rock band of the last four years for simply hearkening back to the days of Loaded and Marquee Moon/Closer and Pornography, they are attacking them for substituting chic depoliticized commoditized pseudisongcraft for lyrical or musical innovation, performing and supporting the neoliberal colonialism of urban spaces, providing a cynically uncritical soundtrack for empire, and being boring as fuck. Analyses which ignore “Entertain”’s references to Ron Suskind’s New Yorker piece and its infamous “reality based community” and Dalton Trumbo’s popular-front era antiwarnovel “Johnny Got His Gun” are missing a great deal of the song’s point and power.

I like the woods because no note on the album, not even in the solo you’re so intent on maligning is thrown away. There is a language to Brownstein’s playing even when she’s heavily under the influence of wanky fretboard acrobats like Jimmy Page and David Gilmour and uh, Richie Blackmore. The chaos, the disorder, and how you find your way through it is, after all, the whole point of the album.

I thought they kicked ass on thursday night. Doesn’t mean I wouldn’t love to hear them play “A Quarter to Three” or “Dance Song ‘97″ live someday, (I love the quieter stuff too) but I think the new stuff merits deeper analysis than curt dismissal and reactionary pining for work they’ve surpassed since.

“Sleater-Kinney are just a lot better at writing about personal things, and consistently trip up when they write about politics on a large scale.”

I don’t entirely agree with this. I think they’re very good at talking about the contradictory matrices through which subjectivities are formed, the micropolitics in which gender and sexuality are negotiated. That’s where Call the Doctor and the first album are strong, but i think they have also found ways to expand out from dealing with the politics of the body and the self to talking in very specific terms about capital, the state, and imperial war geopolitics, i.e., the title track on One Beat, which may be my favorite S-K song ever. Yeah, “Combat Rock” may not quite work, (though I emphatically think “Far Away” does,) but i also think they’ve gotten very skilled at addressing “the political” in new, nuanced, and exciting ways, and that’s why I like “entertain.” Plus, interpol suck.

I really don’t buy the whole “Woods as retro-cliche” argument. It doesn’t sound anything like any of the bands they’re supposed to be ripping off, Carrie Brownstein’s guitar work is still wonderfully subtle (”What’s Mine Is Yours”, “Night Light,”) and even the song you’re giviing them the most shit for (”Let’s Call It Love”) has some pretty powerful lyrical weight directing and giving meaning to the extremely long guitar solo.

I don’t think “The Woods” sounds anything like any other band I’ve ever heard, whether from 1969 or the present. It’s still so Sleater-Kinney.

And I don’t think “Entertain” is “rockist” if we’re referring to the K. Sanneh definition of it (and do we really have to ever refer to that again). The heart of that song isn’t 1984 or 1972 but the what follows, “Where’s the fuck you, where’s the black and blue?”

I also like how S-K have never (to my knowledge) named which bands they’re critiquing in that song, but everyone else can in a heartbeat.

Why ask them to make The Hot Rock II? I love that album too, dearly. (And I love Fluxblog.) But how safe and boring that would be. I see “The Woods” as taking the feelings of The Hot Rock into deeper, more entangled, more… adult territory (especially in Wilderness, Rollercoaster, and Let’s Call it Love/Night Light.) It’s so dark.

And one last thing, I think Modern Girl is one of the saddest, most bitter songs they’ve ever written.

I for one, think the operative phrases in the song are “reality is the new fiction the say/truth is truer these days/truth is man-made” and “and if your art is done/johnny get your gun.” The “borecore” may be what they get asked about on MTV2 but it has almost no real weight in the song’s lyrics.

And now that I think about it, I think the “borecore” argument is wrong. They aren’t claiming that only true art comes from pain, they’re alleging that the music they are attacking doesn’t push or challenge anyone, which is different.

I don’t feel like The Woods is at all conceptually challenging to me except that it pushes my limit to be embarassed by people who I like who make poorly-considered arguments in support of political points that I mostly agree with.

matthew be crazy! “far away” is maybe my favorite s-k song. i was really bummed that they didn’t play it in minneapolis.