sleater kinney
one beat
From the One Beat that begins this rock opus there is little doubt that these three ladies mean business. One Beat is a fantastic album from a group that is known for releasing fantastic albums that just keep improving. If you didn't like Sleater Kinney before, this album will probably not convince you to like them now. However, fans of the band will recognize One Beat as Sleater Kinney's most accomplished work to date, both lyrically and musically. All the trademark SKinneyisms are present: The piercing vocals, the beautiful harmonies, the political and social comment, and the tightest and most creative punk flavoured hard rock riffing in the entire music biz. It's all here, and it's all louder, meaner, cleaner, bigger and badder then ever on this album.
Lyrically, the album touches upon the aftermath of 9/11 on two tracks (Far Away,Combat Rock), and the tone overall seems much more personal than on previous efforts. Several tracks on the album find singer/guitarist Corin Tucker singing about her young child, and almost all the songs are written in the first person point of view. Overall the lyrics are clever if not somewhat cryptic, and though I would not presume to speak of their meaning, they are delivered in a manor that invites you to sing along and agree with them. The harmonies are always stunning and creative, and they continue to be one of my favorite things about Sleater Kinney. They close the album at their peak with the incredible track Sympathy:
I've got this curse in my hands
All I touch turns to black
Turns to dust turns to sand
This is Sleater Kinney at their very best. Musically, the band rock out even harder than usual in the two tracks Step Aside and Funeral Song . They get really creative in the narrative Prisstina, exploring some sounds not usually in the Sleater Kinney catalogue (think theremin and keyboard). The intangible Sleater Kinney cool riff factor is in full effect in several songs. Witness the bridges in Combat Rock, Light-Rail Coyote, and pretty much the intirety of Oh!.
The packaging contains full lyrics, some photos and collages, and on the last page a cool newsclipping and photo that tells how Light-Rail Coyote got its name. Overall this is a top-notch album that is comprised of all above average songs with zero duds. If you enjoy hard rock, are an old-school punk, or if you are already a fan, you should pick this disk up as soon as possible. It will not dissapoint, I promise.
stats
It is
Sunday May 18, 2008 8:03 am
This page served 1165 times
credits
This page, and all pages on this site were created and are maintained by Darren Kirby using valid XHTML 1.0 and CSS, and are ©copyright 2002 - 2008. The Penguin image was created by Tukka, and is used by permission. Inspiration for the look of this site was provided by Eric A. Meyer's CSS gallery. This website runs on Gentoo Linux. It is served by Apache. PHP and MySQL hold together the backend.