Sleater-Kinney’s return has made it it all too easy to grasp at low hanging fruit. They are “comeback queens”, this is the “return of riot grrl”. But, despite that, the truth is that the trio have completely blown all expectations out of the water with ‘No Cities To Love’.
And they’ve done it, as usual, completely on their own terms. Forever square pegs, they continue to shape their own mould two decades on from the arrival of their self-titled debut. Here, on A New Wave, they hit the nail on the head: “No outline will ever hold us. It’s not a new wave it’s just you and me…invent our own kind of obscurity.”
Although this is the band’s first album since 2005’s ‘The Woods’, which saw them take an experimental turn before a 10 year hiatus, ‘No Cities To Love’ finds Sleater-Kinney harness the best elements of their past work and fuse it together to make something greater than its constituent parts.
Their words still pack the same punch they did on ‘Dig Me Out’, the staccato vocals are as prevalent as they were on Sell Out, from their debut, and the dirty, distorted guitars still serve as a reminder of the Pacific Northwest scene that spawned them.
But, this record marks an evolutionary step that cannot simply be credited to maturity. The trio have grown musically, lifting the fuzz on Hey Darling, which has a cleaner sound than the hook-laden Bury Our Friends, a rolling, Jumper-esque six-string feast on which Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker yell: “We’re wild and weary but we won’t give in.”
This is the album Sleater-Kinney were always meant to make. It’s as though every step they’ve taken in the last 20 years has led to it. They have rendered themselves peerless.
Sleater-Kinney Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:
Mon March 23 2015 - LONDON Roundhouse
Tue March 24 2015 - MANCHESTER Albert Hall
Wed March 25 2015 - GLASGOW O2 ABC
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