Artist: Sleater-Kinney
Album: Little Rope
Year: 2024
Grade: B
In Brief: Sleater-Kinney’s second outing as a duo, while it isn’t anything revolutionary compared to their catalogue at large, certainly makes some strides to improve upon the largely forgettable Path of Wellness. Tragedies on both a global and personal scale have made the songwriting a lot more visceral this time around, and it seems like there’s been a conscious decision to emphasize the leaner, meaner songs and dump the stranger experiments and the down-tempo filler. This is an album that finds two women staring down some of their most deep-seated fears, knowing that confronting them is better than walking away. It might not be as boisterous as the band’s heyday, but they’ve still got some worthwhile things to say, and the ability to startle the listener out of their complacency while doing it.
I have to do a gut check these days whenever the name Sleater-Kinney comes up. Especially when I’m gearing up to do an album review. It’s been nearly five years since the startling departure of drummer Janet Weiss from the band, they’re now on their second record made as a duo without her, and yet her name is still the first thing to come to mind when I think of the band. I feel like it would be unfair of me to make the blanket assumption that nothing the band does without her can possibly be as good as personal favorites of mine like One Beat, The Woods, and No Cities to Love (with the latter being my onboarding point when it came out back in 2015) where it felt like all three members were on fire, each locked so tightly into what the two others were doing that it seemed impossible to separate them from one another. It was an interesting space for a feisty and fiercely feminist art-punk band to occupy – and their music bore a distinctive stamp that set them apart from their peers, for reasons well beyond the simple fact that they were an all-girl band in what’s typically considered a boys’ club genre. Weiss came to feel that her creative input was no longer valued equally to that of founding members Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein while 2019’s The Center Won’t Hold was in the works, and her decision to leave wound up casting a dark shadow on that album’s release and reception. 2021 saw the band reintroducing itself as a duo on the self-produced Path of Wellness, and while a part of me was surprised that they had the audacity to keep making music as Sleater-Kinney, I figured I should at least hear them out – see what all the fuss was about this creative vision that had these two women so locked in on the same wavelength that they could no longer make room for a third person in the artistic process. My response to that album was kind of a heavy shrug – it wasn’t different enough from their past to feel like an intriguing new direction, and it sorely lacked the energy of their best material. There were a few solid songs, with the title track and “High in the Grass” even showing the duo in a happier space than I was used to – but beyond those highlights, I’ve almost entirely forgotten how the rest of that album goes. They were non-committal on the topic of whether Wellness would be the last word from Sleater-Kinney, or they’d continue to make more music going forward. When that question was finally answered with the release of Little Rope‘s first few singles in late 2023, I’ll confess that my reaction was mostly, “Alright, here we go again, I guess”. I realized when the album came out in January of 2024 that if I ever stood a decent chance of connecting with Sleater-Kinney’s music again, I was going to have to let go of the past and do my darndest to accept the band on their own terms again, instead of continuing to regard them as a shallow reflection of a trio I once became enamored with that now had a gaping hole in it.
Here’s the thing – a couple of those singles that came out before the album are actually really good. “Hell” and “Untidy Creature”, which bookend Little Rope as its first and last tracks, feel like interesting new wrinkles on the Sleater-Kinney sound that I had gotten into rather late in the game, after their mid-2010s reunion – the gnarled, abrasive guitar riffs, the confrontational vibrato of Corin Tucker trading off lyrical barbs with the scrappier musings of Carrie Brownstein, the gutsy chorus hooks that you could sometimes call “pop” if you squinted hard enough, but that also had the sort of pretty/ugly balance that made them a curious acquired taste. Bringing in John Congleton to produce was an interesting choice – what first comes to mind when I think of him is a few Grammy-bait Top 40 heavyweights that he’s worked with, but he’s also been all over the indie-sphere over the past few decades, and Sleater-Kinney had been awaiting the opportunity to work with him for quite a while. I’d definitely say that this record certainly pops out of the speakers with more of a layered sound and the occasional accent of a piano or synthesizer, but this isn’t a capitulation to total pop accessibility – there are also some startlingly visceral moments here that seem like they wouldn’t have been possible on the rather stiff-sounding Path of Wellness. Angie Boylan, who became their touring drummer back in 2019 when they found themselves in need of one in a hurry, got to accompany the band in the studio here – I think she may have played on a few tracks on Wellness, too, but she sounds way more lively on a few of the standouts here, reminding me that she’s not just a Janet Weiss understudy. Time will tell if they ever try to recruit her as a full-time member – a move that would probably open up some old wounds for a lot of fans, but since I’m trying to let bygones be bygones, I’ll be so bold as to suggest that if they turn in another record where she shows the strength and versatility that she has here, I’d be willing to accept that as the new status quo. In terms of performance, the band just sounds more sure of itself on this record than they did on their last two, and while they might not come out swinging on all ten of these tracks, the ones where they do are easily worth the price of admission.
About halfway through the recording of Little Rope, in late 2022, tragedy hit extremely close to home for the band when Carrie Brownstein’s mother died in a car accident. The record was halfway written at that point, already having started to focus on tragedy and how we respond to it, and a palpable sense of grief and the need for support in difficult times understandably crept into the remaining songs. This isn’t a happy record by a long shot (honestly, what Sleater-Kinney record is?), but the way it chooses to stare down fear and loss, shout back in the face of it and say “You might’ve kicked me down, but you will not defeat me” is quite cathartic. It’s a record that I’d say is haunted in a good way, because of its choice to call out the darkness in our world for what it is. Are there a few tracks that feel rather pedestrian in comparison to the noisiest and most inventive ones? Sure, but that’s been a sticking point for me on even some of their best albums. Does the record ever get bogged down with second-rate material to the point where it starts to drag? For the first time in almost ten years, NO. Little Rope works surprisingly well as a straight-through listen, wrapping up at just under 35 minutes in a way that leaves the listener wanting more. Their past two records didn’t exceed this length by much, and yet by the end of both of them, I kind of felt burned out. I genuinely haven’t gone back to The Center Won’t Hold or Path of Wellness in full since their respective release years, and I feel like Little Rope is good enough to break that trend – something to throw on when I need to spice up my listening palette and maybe blow off a little frustrated steam. I’d like to think they still have an even better record than this one left in the tank – but in the meantime, I’ll take this one as a sign that they’re capable of righting a ship that was in danger of running aground.
INDIVIDUAL TRACKS:
1. Hell
The contrast between the grey, murky hues of this song’s opening verse and the no-holds-barred gusto of its chorus is downright riveting. It doesn’t immediately resemble any other Sleater-Kinney song that I can think of offhand, but it’s a vocal showcase for Corin in a way that I feel like we didn’t hear a whole lot of on Little Rope. Getting used to her vocals has certainly been a journey for me, but now I find that something’s missing if a Sleater-Kinney record doesn’t prominently feature her piercing vibrato. Angie just tears into it on the drums and cymbals when that chorus hits, and there’s a shrill, high-pitched guitar (or maybe a synth? It’s hard to tell.) riding on top of it – so you get a nice little sonic wallop after the more contemplative verse that is trying to figure out what someone’s own personal hell would look like, maybe in some ways even rationalizing that we all go through our own personal hells sooner or later, and we become prone to lashing out when we’re reached the end of our rope and feel like we’ve got nothing to lose. Corin belts out the chorus’s lone repeating phrase, “You ask WHYYYYYYYYYY? like there’s no tomorrow”, as if there were no tomorrow, and it’s clear what a place of frustration and desperation she’s coming from here. What’s left unspoken, but what really resonates, is the difference between what the women of Sleater-Kinney have done when pushed to their emotional breaking point during the making of this album, and what we as a society often make excuses for “a young man with a gun” doing at that same breaking point. This band is turning its grief into hard-hitting art, rather than taking it out on other people. And in the process, they turned in one of their all-time best performances.
Grade: A+
2. Needlessly Wild
Carrie’s first lead vocal on the album seems a bit underplayed at first – she’s sort of speak-singing and not using the full power of her voice, and it downplays the song’s scrappy energy as a result. But don’t worry, she’ll get there. She almost sounds like she’s trying to maintain someone else’s idea of what “control” should look like in order to appear civilized and feminine and all those nice social constructs that we expect people to adhere to – but then the seams start to come apart and she’s forced to admit that she’s still the same edgy, feral individual that she’s always been, and it’s time to stop grooming an facade she’s not interested in keeping up – this is who she is, love it or hate it. Midway through the song, she lets a few guitar licks loose that are reminiscent of the No Cities to Love track “Fangless”, and that’s the real turning point – her vocals become rougher and more unhinged past that point, and the song hits a lot harder and ends up being a lot more fun as a result. Do I wish it was a little less repetitive? Yeah, but then so did Carrie when she first wrote it – she was encouraged to keep it as is because it was a better fit for the unapologetic tone of the song than it would have been if she’d tried to come up with more “articulate” ways to write around that one central idea.
Grade: B
3. Say It Like You Mean It
This song is more of a restrained one for Corin, though it’s definitely one where you can feel the sense of loss that she’s dealing with. It’s got more of a direct, up-tempo, pop/rock sort of feel (though I apply the term “pop” loosely because the guitars are still a bit raggedy, as per this band’s usual), and her voice is more controlled and melodic, but the anguish still comes through clearly. Someone’s on the verge of leaving her, or else something that she values in her life is coming to an end. She’s trying to face the situation bravely, rather than scrambling to maintain it and only prolonging its miserable death in the process. Her sheer force of will is admirable when her one demand comes through loud and clear “Say it like you mean it/This goodbyе hurts when you go.” She wants to know that it’s really over, that the other person who is in control of ending it fully intends to do so, and if that’s the case, it sounds like she’s resolved to accept the loss and move on as best she knows how. The underlying message here seems to be that nothing we love in this life lasts forever – we have to accept that everything ultimately ends, and enjoy it while there’s still time to do so.
Grade: B
4. Hunt You Down
Is it weird for me to describe this song’s pulsating bass and grumbly, yet bouncy guitar lines “danceable”? It’s impossible to avoid once Angie’s infectious drum beat kicks in at the chorus – this is a full-on dance-rocker, the kind that brings to mind the heyday of Franz Ferdinand, and also the era when Sleater-Kinney was turning in some of their most weirdly catchy material. For a song whose premise is that “The thing you fear the most will hunt you down”, it seems almost like sacrilege for it to have this perky rhythm and a chorus that almost dares you to sing along – but then, that’s kind of the point. Given the inevitability of loss that was discussed in the previous song, we get two choices – run away from it and hope that blind luck spares you from the worst of the devastation – or face it and figure out a way to grow as a result of it. Carrie certainly starts the song in a rough place, wittily described as “I’ve been down so long, I pay rent to the floor”. But over the course of the song’s two verses, she seems to gain the willingness to let her sorrow be what it is, to follow where it’s leading her, and to gain some empathy for others going through it in the process, rather than just curling up in a ball on the floor and acting completely defeated. They’ve taken subject matter that you’d expect to be the exact opposite of “fun”, and turned it into a defiant rallying cry, as if to say, “Yeah, the thing I fear is eventually gonna find me – so bring it on, I’m not hiding from it any more!” Carrie punctuates this one with a nice little guitar solo in the bridge, and against all odds, I’ve got a smile on my face and a desire to pump my fist in the air by the time it’s over.
Grade: A-
5. Small Finds
This is one of two songs on this album that I’ve had a slightly harder time connecting with – which is honestly not a bad batting average, considering how often the past two albums swung and missed. Maybe there was something about the atonal guitar licks and Corin doing more of a speaking/yelping thing than singing in the verses that didn’t click with me immediately – though honestly, this sounds closer to the Sleater-Kinney of old that I claim to have missed since they became a duo, so perhaps I should re-evaluate what I’m actually wishing for here. It gets feistier, and the chorus fills it out with a meatier hook, once you get deeper into the song, so it’s actually a better performance than I initially gave it credit for. Its lyrical focus fits nicely with “Needlessly Wild”, with Corin describing her mental state as though as were a stray dog, just scrounging around for whatever scraps and handouts she can find, no time to really worry about what’s healthy when the goal is simply to not starve. We get some context for the album title here, with it coming up in the midst of her begging in the opening verse: “Is it food or garbage?/It smells good enough/Can you gimme a little rope?/Come on, gimme some.” The overall meaning that I get from this one is that being constantly in survival mode can suck all the joy out of life – it’s hard to have a sense of purpose when you’re just trying to ensure your most basic needs are met. But there’s a deeper longing to be accepted, understood, and loved that doesn’t go away in that time of crisis – physically you might be able to live without those things, but mentally and emotionally, you’re going to feel like you’re only barely alive.
Grade: B-
6. Don’t Feel Right
Hold up a second… is this another one of those sneaky fun songs that sounds way more upbeat than it ought to, given the subject matter? Yep, sure is. Carrie makes sure of it with her trademark “scribbly” guitar playing, and once again Angie’s up to the task with a rather energetic drum beat, all of this seeming at odds with a song that’s all about procrastination, about recognizing all the things you want to change in your life for the sake of better mental and physical health, and then rationalizing that you’ll do them when you feel better. I’m not sure whether this is a bit of self-deprecating humor on Carrie’s part, or an admission that when she’s really going through some stuff, she’s too damn tired to accomplish anything beyond the bare minimum to survive. The overall theme of the record would seem to support the latter interpretation – but I don’t mind that she delivers it with a bit of a smart-assed wink and a nudge, as if to say we’ve all been there and we all think we know better until it happens to us. While Carrie and Corin have mostly been trading off lead vocals one-for-one throughout the album, I like how they come together on the sarcastically cheery-sounding chorus: “Don’t hang around, I’m a real let down!” For a song that depicts its protagonist as a buzzkill, she sure sounds like the life of the party based on this performance.
Grade: B+
7. Six Mistakes
The album’s darkest and moodiest song also turns out to be its most boisterous – Corin’s rhythm guitar has a thick buzz to it when the song starts out, which already gives it a foreboding tone, but when Carrie breaks in with an utterly screwed-up part on the lead guitar, the volume level seems to suddenly get jacked up and it’s like all hell is breaking loose. It’s a moment that feels like the instruments are clawing at the walls, desperate to be let out of the prison holding them. Angie’s drum beat here is once again upbeat, with an implied spring in its step, yet strangely menacing in its simplicity – it reminds me of 3 Doors Down‘s “Superman”, of all things, but in this context it comes across a lot creepier. What the six mistakes in the title of this song refer to, I’m not sure – there’s never a point where they seem to be enumerated. But Corin turns in one of her most urgent vocal performances as she plays the role of an invisible woman who camps outside the house of someone she loves, hoping in vain to be noticed or to get some sort of message through that keeps her from being completely ignored, only to walk away frustrated at the unrequited nature of their relationship each time. She doesn’t have a superpower, and this isn’t a fantasy – turns out the “mistake” that made her invisible is that she had the audacity to get older, and to expect someone to continue to care for her the way they did when she was young. You see, society hates it when women age and still expect to be noticed and appreciated while we’re too busy being distracted by whoever the next young, pretty “it” girl happens to be. Why can’t they just… y’know, NOT do that? (Said your reviewer with a heavy sarcastic inflection.)
Grade: A-
8. Crusader
So hey, I don’t know if you all knew this, but the members of Sleater-Kinney are not big fans of moral crusaders. (I’ll pause here to make room for the inevitable sarcastic response of “Naw, REALLY?!” or “No shit, Sherlock!” that I’m sure is coming.) And they’ve come up with a song that makes it pretty darn obvious how they feel about people with more conservative/religious ideologies trying to restrict their personal rights. On some level, you might say that’s what Sleater-Kinney does on an average Tuesday – this is not a band that has ever shied away from expressing its contempt for people who would trample on the rights of women or minorities. But the way they do it here is… wow, it’s really on the nose. Usually I have to do a bit of homework to figure out what contemporary issue a more politically pointed song from them is referring to – like pushing back against the Iraq War and American jingoism on some of One Beat‘s songs, or The Center Won’t Hold‘s stark closing track “Broken” being about the dismay felt upon seeing a perpetrator of sexual assault ascend to the Supreme Court. This one – well, it’s got a danceable groove that is once again hard to resist, but wow, does it hit its target with the broadest strokes possible: “You’re burning all the books in this town/But you can’t destroy the words in our mouths.” “If we’re wicked, then you’re wretched/Take your sheep, wе’ll keep the blessed.” Don’t get me wrong, I’m 100% on board with the message of this song – I just find that it’s being communicated in an unusually clunky manner. And the chorus, which seems like a sudden shift away from this broad criticism toward a more positive sentiment of unity among the disenfranchised (“Forget the pain and let the drum bang out/The echo, it catches on”) almost could have been dropped in from a completely different song. I still enjoy listening to this one – musically it’s a blast! But it’s the rare Sleater-Kinney song where I’ve felt a little less enthusiastic about it upon deeper examination of the lyrics – usually I have trouble understanding where a song of theirs is coming from it at first, then I take a closer look and feel enriched by what they’re trying to say. I can’t fault them for wanting to vent some frustrations at some of the ways the clock seems to be getting turned back on social progress these days. But it’s not gonna make any salient points for anyone who isn’t already convinced.
Grade: B
9. Dress Yourself
The album’s biggest stumble comes second to last, in the form of a muddled mid-tempo track that experiments a little bit with keyboards and drum programming, but doesn’t really commit to it enough to do anything particularly different or interesting, trying later in the song to amp up the energy by bringing stronger drums and guitar in, but still falling far short of the urgency and messy intrigue typically expected from a Sleater-Kinney song. The lyrics, which are about the everyday struggle just to get out of bed and make yourself look halfway decent in order to face the outside world, and how much harder those seemingly simple actions can be when you’re depressed, do fit into the album’s overall narrative of reeling from loss and trying to figure out a way to cope. But there’s no hook to it, no interesting ambiance, really nothing to give it a reason for backing off from the band’s usual aggression. I’ve heard Sleater-Kinney do keyboard-driven tracks well before, and I’ve heard them use drum programming and electronic effects well (most notably on The Center Won’t Hold‘s title track), so the fact that it goes outside their usual two guitars and a drum kit lineup isn’t the problem per se – it’s just, why bother changing up the sound at all if the result is gonna be this pedestrian?
Grade: C
10. Untidy Creature
Thankfully, Little Rope ends on a strong note – actually, with the first song out of the ten that Corin and Carrie wrote together, not realizing at the time that it had kicked off the process of making a new album. They knew they had something special when they came up with the anthemic guitar riff at the beginning of it, and also when they gave Corin a strong, defiant chorus to sing that was good enough to warrant closing out the record with it – now it’s one of the duo’s favorite album closers (an assessment that I wholeheartedly agree with). It’s not a blisteringly fast or particularly noisy rocker, but more of a strong-willed statement of fact, that no matter how much society may treat women as animals to be caged up and only brought out when it pleases men, they will resist captivity and escape those cages every time. So much of this album has been about resisting the things society tells women they ought to be. “Needlessly Wild” pushed back against the notion that women are inherently socially awkward if they’re scrappy and swaggery, even though we often admire “rugged” men with these qualities. “Don’t Feel Right”, perhaps more subtly, challenged the notion that women are just being “hysterical” if they don’t bounce back immediately from a crisis and if they need time to grieve or just do a little self-care. The catalyst for this particular song, though it’s not outright stated in the lyrics, was the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the feeling that women are slowly losing control of their own bodily autonomy. As a man, I’m never going to know how demoralizing it is for a woman to feel like she’s being told her place in society is basically that of a mare to be used for breeding as men see fit. But the idea of it certainly grosses me out, so I applaud the promise implicit in this song that no matter what you try to take away from women, they’re gonna fight tooth and nail to get it back, and no matter what limits you try to impose on them, they’ll bust through those boundaries every time.
Grade: A-
WHAT’S IT WORTH TO ME?
Hell $2
Needlessly Wild $1
Say It Like You Mean It $1
Hunt You Down $1.50
Small Finds $.75
Don’t Feel Right $1.25
Six Mistakes $1.25
Crusader $1
Dress Yourself $.25
Untidy Creature $1.50
TOTAL: $11.50
BAND MEMBERS:
Carrie Brownstein: Vocals, guitars
Corin Tucker: Vocals, guitars
LISTEN FOR YOURSELF:
MORE USEFUL LINKS:
http://www.sleater-kinney.com
https://www.facebook.com/SleaterKinney
murlough23 
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