Sleater-Kinney – No Cities to Love
Once-legendary creative spaces of New York City are gentrifying more and more by the day, becoming beacons of status, with value placed on just “being seen” in them. Detroit, a hub of Motown and punk rock, has all but gone to the dogs, as infrastructure crumbles and people are getting the hell out quicker than any other major American city. I could go on, but I’ll leave it there.
This is the doing of a post-capitalist, post-9/11 America, and for Corin Tucker, Carrie Brownstein, and Janet Weiss of Sleater-Kinney, their new album, No Cities to Love, is less of an “old-man-yells-at-cloud” sentiment found in most lamentations on the state of culture and more of a wake-up call for us to start building a new culture from the rubble of the old. Simply because nobody else is going to do it for us.
Sleater-Kinney has certainly spent a lot of time thinking about these changes in their 10-year downtime. Their sly, slow-burn rolling out of promo material and singles towards the latter part of 2014 pointed to a new album that few saw coming at the particular time it did. Their latest LP, and the group’s first since 2005’s The Woods, is a literate, furiously heavy consolidation of the death of the “artist’s city.”
Their angular, guitar-driven sound, punctuated by furious drum blasts and acrobatic vocals, hasn’t changed much since 2000’s All Hands on the Bad One – or 1997’s essential Dig Me Out – but a certain attention to production headspace on this latest record displays a markedly cohesive growth. It’s not a concept album by any means, but these very real socio-cultural problems seep through nearly every aspect of the record’s 32 minutes.
And it’s not entirely hopeless, either. “Invent our own kind of obscurity,” holler Tucker and Brownstein on “A New Wave,” one of the album’s handful of standout cuts – a sentiment that seems more suggestive to do something about our current situation, particularly at the grassroots level. This means re-evaluating ourselves, the places we inhabit, and the art we create in these spaces.