Music
On the long-awaited cultural item #1: Wild Flag, Sleater-Kinney and me
One of my favourite bands when I was growing up was Sleater-Kinney. The Portland, Oregon, trio wailed and beat their way through a career that spanned from riot-grrl recordings in Australia to hall-of-fame finality six years ago. Mesmerically energised and pointedly feminist, Sleater-Kinney’s music was both catnip and Catherine wheel for me. (Try this song, with bonus video by Miranda July.) If I weren’t so averse to mawkishness I’d suggest a chemically improbable relationship between their music and my blood.
After the band released their 2005 swan song, The Woods, I thought that would be it. Never again would I anticipate a new album quite like I had theirs, despite the fact that the individual band members have kept creating, though in different guises. Powerful, polarising guitarist/vocalist Corin Tucker has formed The Corin Tucker Band; guitarist/vocalist Carrie Brownstein has been telling people to ‘put a bird on it’ on television’s Portlandia and last year put to bed her excellent NPR music blog, Monitor Mix; and drummer Janet Weiss has been playing with high-profile acts including Conor Oberst, and Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks.
But all my grown-up equanimity dissipated when I found out that Weiss and Brownstein would be collaborating again in a new band, Wild Flag, whose self-titled debut album was released last month. When I discovered that ex-Helium singer Mary Timony, another adolescent favourite, was also in the band (Rebecca Cole, previously of The Minders, makes four), I scribbled the release date in my diary and barely stopped myself from decorating the reminder in little pink hearts. It was embarrassing.
The album trailer was concise and tantalising, showcasing punchy guitars and girl-group harmonies. I began dreaming in the solid, deep pastels of the album art (designed by Beginners director Mike Mills). I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt this excited about music. And when I could finally download the album, my heart raced. I was ready to fall in love again.
To my delight, Wild Flag is excellent. Brownstein slings her voice around like she does her guitar, punctuating direct lyrics with bellows and yelps. Hers is a vocal strut to rival Jagger’s. In early Sleater-Kinney recordings, Brownstein’s vocals were often restrained, a counterpoint to Tucker’s ululations. But in opening track ‘Romance’, she transforms a simple question – ‘Hey, can you feel it?’ – into a gusty demand, hailing every listener who has ever turned the volume up to 11.
Timony’s voice is much the same as it has always been: intimate and edgeless, occasionally disappearing into the mix. Her bent for gently occult lyrics appears here, too, joining a straight-rock invitation – ‘Come on and join our electric band’ – to something that, wonderfully, resembles the script for a lost Zelda game (‘Dance all night or turn to sand’). Timony’s capacity for wise-teen subversion, so appealing to my younger self, is also in evidence here – ‘We’re gonna let the good times toll’.
Most enchanting about Wild Flag is that the experienced individual players cohesively and persuasively knit together. No one wanted to hear an album recorded by Sleater-Kinney minus one, and Timony and Brownstein’s previous musical project, The Spells, seemed to be missing something. They’ve clearly found it in Cole and Weiss, whose backing vocals add a sweet fullness throughout the album. It’s often suggested that Weiss is one of the best living rock drummers, and her dynamism drives and enhances songs that run a punk-to-prog-to-garage gamut.
There’s joy in Wild Flag. Not only in the lyrics, which continually return to the power of music to enhearten and beguile, but also in the riotous mastery the band demonstrates. Both Timony and Weiss have said in interviews that, joining Wild Flag, they ‘wanted a dream band’. It’s what I wanted, too – and, by god, I got it.
Estelle Tang is Online Editor of Kill Your Darlings.
3 Responses to On the long-awaited cultural item #1: Wild Flag, Sleater-Kinney and me
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12:54 pm, October 21, 2011
Ah, the revisiting of youthful rock influences. They’re a mighty pull, those. I felt this when Dean Wareham recently came to town with Galaxie 500 tunes.
I, too, have been a long-time fan of Sleater-Kinney. A late-career show of theirs I caught in Chicago had them as headliners with The White Stripes as opening act; the proper order in my notebook. Listening to SK makes me want to eat raw bars of pig iron and drive a convertible far in excess of speed limits, accusing my accompanying passengers that ‘Yer No rock’n’roll fun’ … a jibe I relished doling out to former colleague and friend, Anna Barnes, given how juxtaposing it is to that particular target.
One of my top five most embarrassing life moments involves the eponymous Olympia, WA boulevard and it’s freeway on-ramp to Interstate 5 and a, how shall we say (?), rather antique oyster shooter eaten earlier in the day. I’ll stop on that note.
I shall definitely check out Wild Flag and see if those old PacNorthwest genes still fit. I’m sure they will.
1:01 pm, October 21, 2011
‘its freeway’, that is
9:11 pm, October 24, 2011
Ah, everyone needs a gross freeway story. I suspect mine is pretty similar to yours, though mine involved a Moroccan coffee.
The other nice thing about the Wild Flag album is that I’ve been revisiting Sleater-Kinney and Mary Timony albums over the last few weeks. Pretty great feeling.