Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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31 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Buy This Album, August 28, 2002
With the return of producer John Goodmanson from the Dig Me Out days, you'd almost expect a home coming to that edgy unpolished sound. Expect better. In fact, there are spots on this album have more raw energy than anything since Call the Doctor, but with all the maturity that the band's developed since The Hot Rock
and All Hands. The sound is much richer, with many more layers than any outing before. In fact, Sleater-Kinney counterpoint begins almost to approach the majesty of a cathedral choir, backed up by its organ. The guitars develop a monolithic wall of sound that cannot be gotten around, and cannot be pierced. This album won't disappoint any Sleater-Kinney fan, no matter what era she may be partial to.Though you can hear plenty of straight-ahead words and guitar punk rock, there's tons more. Just like everyone rock band in the world, there's a fresh element of electronica, but unlike everyone else, the instrument is a theremin, one of the very first electronic instruments, before the synthesizers now everywhere aro
und the music world. There's an element of soul, especially in the last song Sympathy, which if it weren't for Corin's distinctive voice (a familiar Olympia from the South reminiscent of a Kurt Cobain), you'd almost mistake it for a song from The Gossip. The impact of September 11th can be obviously felt on this album. "Far Away", which from the Pacific Northwest, New York must have seemed, is an especially piercing reminder of that inexplicable sudden nausea everyone felt that day. You feel it again in the guitar, in an unfamiliar dissonance in the familiar Corin-Carrie counterpoint. Even with a new found patriotism, the classic antiauthoritarianism of punk rock can still be felt with "and the president hides / while working men rush in / to give their lives." While Dan Rather, and all the news networks forgot about the administration's cowardice immediately upon the news of the
attacks, punk rock has not. Compared with the war mongering of the President, unconstitutional detention of 'suspects' and the vote mongering in step marching by the Democrats, the patriotism that Sleater-Kinney sings, "Where is the questioning, where is the protest song / since when is skepticism un-American" in Combat Rock makes it OK to be patriotic in that gut level sense that one feels reluctant to in the face of what it has been used as an excuse for. With a sudden expansion of the scope of their politics, they don't leave out the personal. While the first two albums were unmediated screams of pain, these songs are cold, calculated revenge. These are deep wounds that have been festering, the ones that no longer occupy your every thought, but are still palpably there. With lines like "Nobody lingers like your hands on my heart / nobody figures like you've figured me out" in Oh, this is up close and personal. My favorite song on the album, though, still has to be Light Rail Coyote. The title enough says everything. It's about urban wildlife. It's about the one that doesn't fit in, but still manages to scrape together an existence. Yet there's this desperation to it, in "Find me on the eve of suicide / Tell me the city is no place to hide." This is your existence too, and mine.I can't say what this album will do as an introduction to the band--I lost that innocence when I fell in love with the band a long time ago. Still, don't miss this one.
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Best Sleater-Kinney Album (Until The Next One), August 24, 2002
Ok here we go again...picture it now...that face of intense disbelief and shock - that "hurts so good" - (like you just tasted a lemon expression) when the new Sleater-Kinney album comes blasting out of the speakers. I'm here to tell you that "One Beat" delivers it like a sugar rush straight to your head, baby. Cuts through all the retro/fashionable rock BS like a knife through butter. If you had any doubts that S-K couldn't hold it down for a SIXTH album straight (SIXTH!) - then prepare to be surprised. What other band's output has been so flawless? It's been a while since the group last dropped "All Hands On The Bad One" and then came the Time magazine feature. The best rock 'n roll band in the world? For the ones who have been with them since Lori was the drummer - that's a surreal experience. Since then, I've moved away from rock and onto more electronica, hip-hop, soul, and jazz in my musical diet - considering my punk rock days dead and gone. It's been a while since I've touched anything with just guitars and drums in two years? But I'll always support S-K because they are the singular punk band of our time that will stand when the dust clears. I got money on it. Ok so let me tell you about this album. It's all there: the jagged guitar interplay, the welps, cathartic screams, and the HOOKS, god help us - the hooks. Then there's dashes of funk horns and synths. Yeah you heard me right. But like the best groups, S-K has a synergy between it's members. The most similiar thing I can think of is like the conversational aesthetic of hip-hop. Corin, Carrie, and Janet are made for each other - you can't fake this. Oh yeah, the songs are ALL good - I could go into them but [what the heck], just buy the album.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
They may actually have topped Dig Me Out, April 3, 2005
...and I really didn't think that was possible.
This is a spiky, snarky, angry little album, just as punk is supposed to be, but it's also all about the love of life and the refusal to settle for mediocrity in romance or politics or anything else. As always, Corin's voice is not for everyone, though I consider it one of the most spectacular instruments ever to make it onto a CD. And, Oh! -- to steal the title of track 3, which is this album's shamelessly cute, infectious followup to Dig Me Out's "Dance Song '97" -- the melodies, the harmonies, the passion, and that way they have with multiple simultaneous vocal lines to which nobody else out there can quite hold a candle...it's all just plain good. There are a few tracks that I could do without (cough Prisstina cough), but overall, these three women have never been more appealing or less ignorable.
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