Sleater-Kinney: Return of the Roar
A decomposing skull hangs beside Janet Weiss’ doorbell: one bulging eyeball, jagged teeth, strips of flesh. Halloween was a few weeks ago, and Weiss hasn’t gotten around to taking it down yet – perhaps because other, realer ghosts have been haunting her. Like, for instance, the Ford cargo van in her driveway. “That was Sleater-Kinney‘s gear van,” she says. “ ’The Silver Bullet’ – we put more than 200,000 miles on that thing, and it’s still going.” Or take the brand-new vinyl box set perched magisterially in her study, collecting all seven albums by the epochal punk trio that Weiss joined in 1996, that Time called America’s best rock band in 2001, and that announced its “indefinite hiatus” in 2006. Sleater-Kinney – Weiss on drums, Carrie Brownstein on windmilling lead guitar, Corin Tucker providing the klaxon-force lead vocals – had sealed their place in the indie pantheon by that point, with their fans ranging from the midcareer Eddie Vedder, who brought them out on a 2003 arena tour with Pearl Jam, to the pre-career Lena Dunham, who saw them live when she was an adolescent and thrilled, she says, to their “amazing mix of chutzpah and pure skill.”
But the band was tired. Sleater-Kinney’s seventh album, The Woods, pushed them farther from their creative comfort zone than they’d ever gone, and the arduous experience of making it, in wintry upstate New York, left them spent and raw: “It’s freezing; there’s 10 feet of snow every night,” Weiss says. “You’re really isolated. And when you’re working creatively like that, 12 hours a day, sleeping in the same place as each other? It’s an intense experience.” By the end of the tour, she says, “Carrie didn’t like being on the road. Corin wanted to have another kid. We were exhausted.”
They pulled the plug, and for years there was little reason to suspect a reunion. Weiss, a Portland fixture who’s played with Elliott Smith and Stephen Malkmus, focused on other projects, including Wild Flag, an amped-up collaboration with Brownstein. Tucker concentrated on a solo act and on raising two children. And Brownstein became exponentially more famous in just four years by co-creating the satirical sketch series Portlandia (average viewership: about 5 million per season) than Sleater-Kinney had become over two decades (total album sales: 596,000).
Then, one night in 2012, Brownstein and her Portlandia co-star, Fred Armisen, were hanging out at Tucker’s house, on Portland’s southeast side. Tucker made an offhand remark to the effect of maybe-possibly-sometime-imagining getting back together. Armisen became a cheerleader for the idea, as did Tucker’s husband, the filmmaker Lance Bangs. “Then someone called me,” Weiss says. “I think it was Corin, and Carrie put her up to it: ‘See if Janet will do it.’ ” They started messing around in Tucker’s and Brownstein’s basements, seeing how it felt. By early 2014, Brownstein was dropping hints in interviews that the band might re-form, which turns out to have been a coy feint: “The album was probably already done by then,” says Weiss.
Weiss’ bungalow is furnished with the spoils of thrifting on the road: a Seventies-looking leather couch; oil paintings of dogs, horses and tigers; an orange novelty telephone fashioned to look like a basketball. Last night, she, Brownstein and Tucker caught a Portland Trail Blazers game. “We sat courtside, because Carrie gets amazing seats now – thanks to a certain friend of hers named Paul Allen,” Weiss says. Brownstein’s celebrity has earned her a social network of power movers that includes the Blazers’ Microsoft-co-founding owner. “We were down by 16 points, but we turned it around,” Weiss says of the game. “I gave Paul Allen a high-five. It was great.”
Courtside glamour notwithstanding, the L.A.-born Weiss lives a modest, bohemian life that hasn’t changed that much since she first moved to Portland, in 1989. She drives a sensible station wagon, and the towering hedges lining her backyard are wildly overgrown, “because it costs, like, $1,500 to have them trimmed, so I don’t do it that often,” she explains. Recently, Brownstein hooked up Weiss with a job scouting locations on Portlandia. “I get to drive around with the director and have a say in what the show looks like – I love that job,” Weiss says.
In other words, things were perfectly fine post-Sleater-Kinney, and to hear the band members tell it, they approached the reunion with a mixture of excitement and wariness. “I was just like, ‘Carrie, do you have enough time to put into this? Corin, do you have enough time to have it be great?’ ” Weiss says. These questions skirted a trickier one, about whether Tucker and Brownstein – who began the band as romantic partners, and whose elaborately interlocking guitars, vocals and personalities form the band’s spiky DNA – were prepared for the Buckingham-Nicks-esque emotional intensity that working with each other has always entailed. “It’s almost like they’re weird twins,” Weiss says. “They’re kind of telepathic. And they can push each other’s buttons: When the other person’s so in there, sometimes you’re like, ‘Back off!’ ” As Brownstein puts it to me later, “I feel like Corin knows the map of my veins. And you don’t always want someone to know those things.”
“Corin knows the map of my veins,” Brownstein says. “You don’t always want someone to know those things.”
The resulting album, No Cities to Love, transforms those densely tangled doubts, vulnerabilities and ambitions into some of the most assured and powerful music Sleater-Kinney have ever made. There are no slow songs. The lyrics aim high, concerning idol worship here, the collapse of the American middle class there. “Carrie was like, ‘If we’re gonna do this, it’s gotta be a total renewal,’ ” Tucker says. “All or nothing. We just went for it.”
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