Sleater-Kinney - The Center Won't Hold (Album Review)
Tuesday, 27 August 2019
Written by Huw Baines
Some records are defined by the circumstances surrounding their release—it’s an unavoidable byproduct of investing in a band. ‘The Center Won’t Hold’ is destined to be one of those records.
Sleater-Kinney’s iconic trio is now a duo, with drummer Janet Weiss pointedly stepping through the exit door between the announcement of the album and its arrival. “The band is moving in a new direction and it is time for me to move on,” was her terse, unknowable sign off. Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker were left exposed by the news, cradling an unusual, boundary-pushing set of songs ripe for over-examination.
Produced by Annie Clark, St. Vincent to most, ‘The Center Won’t Hold’ has a chugging, synth-doused palette that sidelines Weiss’s muscular playing, but the fact that Clark has been lazily cast as Yoko Ono by some is a particular kick in the teeth for a band who have done so much to rage against music’s mile-wide misogynistic streak.
To point to Clark’s involvement as the driving force behind Sleater-Kinney’s latest reinvention is another coward’s trick—it erases the creative desires of the band in favour of an easily digestible tweet-sized narrative. ‘The Center Won’t Hold’ is different, absolutely, and its authors might come to have complex opinions about it in future, but to suggest that Brownstein, Tucker and Weiss don’t inhabit every inch of its songs is terribly wide of the mark.
Hurry On Home, for example, is vintage Sleater-Kinney—melodic, confrontational and powered by jagged guitars—but it slinks into the world out of the ashes of a title track that’s hardwired to frequencies more commonly utilised by Nine Inch Nails. That electronic power is everywhere, twisting Brownstein and Tucker’s guitars into unusual synthetic shapes on the fabulous Reach Out and buzzing in the background during the enjoyably overblown The Dog / The Body.
Reach Out’s words, though, cut back against the grain of its day-glo exterior. “I’m stuck on the edge,” Tucker pleads, almost unravelling. “Darkness is winning again.” On the spare piano ballad closer, Broken, she stands in solidarity with Christine Blasey Ford, the research psychologist who accused supreme court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault: “I’m breaking for you, all the ways that we tried.” On the other side of the coin, Brownstein vamps her way through the off-Broadway stomp of Bad Dance: a nihilist’s night out at the theatre. “And if the world is ending now then let's dance the bad dance, we've been rehearsing our whole lives,” she sings.
All of these songs have the capacity to alienate long-term fans. Way beyond the mechanics of their personnel, Sleater-Kinney aren’t the spiky guitar band that made ‘The Hot Rock’ 20 years ago—they’re barely the same band that made ‘No Cities To Love’ in 2015. But if what you desire from them is stasis and repetition, then you have been coming to the wrong place for a long time.
Sleater-Kinney Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:
Wed February 26 2020 - LONDON O2 Academy Brixton
Thu February 27 2020 - MANCHESTER Manchester Academy
Fri February 28 2020 - GLASGOW Barrowland
Sun March 01 2020 - DUBLIN Vicar Street
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