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SLEATER-KINNEY
EMPOWERMENT ZONES


"We’ll just have to work ourselves into some kind of frenzy," Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney joked a week ago Monday at the Roxy, after the capacity crowd begged that the fans blowing cool air into the stuffy room might remain on. Braving what Brownstein described from the stage as a "wind tunnel," Olympia’s now longest-running inheritors of the riot grrrl movement embarked on a searing 22-song set bolstered by the twin-guitar interplay of twin vocalists Brownstein and Corin Tucker and driven by the muscular drumming of Janet Weiss.

"I wanna run away, I wanna get away," howled Tucker on the opening tune of a set that drew heavily from their latest album, One Beat (Kill Rock Stars), and Brownstein added her typically more demure vocal asides to offset Tucker’s riveting shrieks. Although the seven-year-old trio are now well beyond their senior proms, One Beat’s "Prisstina" had the biting attitude of snotty high-school girls, and "Turn It On," from 1997’s Dig Me Out, and "Youth Decay," from 2000’s All Hands on the Bad One (both Kill Rock Stars), provoked frantic pogo-punk dance spasms in the packed audience. The tart power pop of "You’re No Rock ’N Roll Fun," one of the catchier tracks from All Hands on the Bad One, inspired a more traditional brand of hip shaking from the crowd; "Burn, Don’t Freeze," a track from 1999’s The Hot Rock (Kill Rock Stars) that built on a foundation of barbed guitar chords and darting vocal trade-offs, brought out the melodic side of a band who’re better known for being aggressively noisy.

Even when the trio pulled out older tunes, the set still highlighted the sophistication that’s developed over the course of Sleater-Kinney’s six full-length CDs. They’ve evolved to encompass everything from blistering punk salvos to gritty garage blues and even tinges of country twang, along with the pop hooks that have been rising ever closer to the surface with each new release — the handclaps and sweetened three-part harmonies that adorn One Beat bring to mind the Go-Go’s. But "Far Away" and "The Remainder" — both from the new disc — remained urgent and ominous, Tucker and Brownstein imbuing them with potent doses of raw emotion.

Raw emotion, after all, is the quality that brought Sleater-Kinney to national attention back in the mid ’90s. It’s a statement of rockist feminist empowerment, and it continues to drive the group, as they reminded the sweaty crowd when they ended the night with a four-song encore that included the sassy "Little Babies," from Dig Me Out, and "I Want To Be Yr Joey Ramone," a landmark track from the their defining 1995 album, Call the Doctor (Chainsaw), that still sums up Sleater-Kinney’s raison d’être.

Issue Date: October 24 - October 31, 2002
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