Yours, Mine And Ours
by Bill Stella

Sleater-Kinney – What's Mine Is Yours
 
It's hardest for me to talk about albums I think are the cream of the crop. My need to express how excited I am about them plays havoc with my judgement. I become verbally bipolar, veering between spewing hyper-exasperated barrages of superlatives and steady intellectualized descriptions which attempt to convey the album's Importance – kinda like this sentence. Can I integrate the two tendencies? Who knows. Here goes:
 
"The Woods" is a visionary set of rock and roll. It is the three decades of anticipation and delayed gratification following the brilliance of Television's "Marquee Moon". It's the punk & new wave & grunge & indie rock & bloody arena rock album I've long wished someone would reach for by pulling together 30 years of splintered rock-streams. It's the impossible Led Zeppelin album of the moment, as if Page, Plant and Bonham became reincarnated, but as very different people who retained a sense of what they were after when they were The New Yardbirds. It's a near-extinct dinosaur egg hatched in the present which prevents the demise of heavy rock-as-effin'-ART by choosing to forge the next evolutionary path, growing in self-determined and current-environment adapted directions. And still, it retains the light-hearted buzzy joy which hard rock had at its best.
 
"What's Mine Is Yours" is / will be famous for its guitar solo: Single-note guitar lines have snaked over the conspiring-together song from its start, but suddenly the "song" stops. More to the point, the rest of the band drops out, a compressed feedback-laden unaccompanied and altogether beautiful noise takes the entire stage, resetting the track in a contrasting feel. The band re-enters, not so much tentatively as supportively, stomping its wide-spread-and-crouching legs, behind the guitar-brandishing witch-doctor who has claimed center-stage and is banishing evil itself. (I told you I'd get inspired / over-excited: but great music works on me like hallucinogens. Not so, you?)
 
Don't let anything I wrote PREVENT you from going to see them! Sleater-Kinney plays The Roseland Ballroom in NYC, Thursday, June 23 and The Trocadero in Philadelphia, Friday, June 24, 2005. That's TODAY and TOMORROW in some time zones. I dunno how much the general public will concur with my belief in the high value of Sleater-Kinney, but the shows ain't sold out. If you're reading this and can possibly make it, join me in NYC. Show them some love and appreciation for making such tremendous strides a decade into their career.
 

 

©2005 Bill Stella