Wild Flag- Wild Flag

Oddly enough, I sat down to begin writing this review while (unknowingly) wearing a Sleater-Kinney t-shirt, and I suppose that's all the context you need to understand my anticipation for this album. The Woods left me thinking Sleater-Kinney were heading in a new direction until the announcement of their indefinite hiatus. Nothing short of a true reunion will sate me, so it's best to take this review with all of that in mind.

Wild Flag, while not a full blown reunion, features two ex-members of Sleater-Kinney and thus is as close as you can get without bringing Corin Tucker in. Moreover, the self titled debut from Wild Flag sounds so similar, it might as well be a Sleater-Kinney record in disguise. It's a hell of a lot more like that band than Corin Tucker's solo record, to boot.

Indeed, even if there were no members of Sleater-Kinney in Wild Flag, they are still the most obvious point of comparison, so let's see if we can nail down the exact records Wild Flag sounds like. Well, to be fair, the addition of organ on some tracks gives Wild Flag a novel, yet not outright fresh, sound. Wild Flag really need to make more use of it if they want to distance themselves from the past. Most of these tracks could be taken straight from sessions for either The Woods ( 'Black Tiles' and, in particular, 'Racehorse', with its heavy hitting low end, fuzzy production, and six minute plus runtime) or The Hot Rock (the tense, introspective, dark, and philosophical songs like 'Something Came Over Me' and 'Electric Band' nod to it most of all). This isn't a bad thing, since those are my two favorite Sleater-Kinney albums...

...but it also leaves me wondering why I'm not listening to those albums instead, which is a bad thing. Despite the strength of these songs and the more straightforward, immediate indie rock Wild Flag employs, I can never shake the feeling that it's more appropriate to label Wild Flag a Sleater-Kinney side project than a supergroup or band in its own right. Make no mistake, if the organ solo on 'Future Crimes' were played on a guitar instead, and Corin Tucker was around to provide backing vocals, it would be a Sleater-Kinney song. I don't mean “would sound like one”, I mean literally would be a Sleater-Kinney song. Wild Flag is a side project or different band in the same way Madvillain is a side project or different band for MF DOOM, which is to say, they barely sound different despite having some different people involved.

When Wild Flag are cooking on all cylinders, such as during the jam in the middle of the aforementioned 'Racehorse', there's a weird, new-ish thrill to the band. But I said “new-ish” and not “new” for a reason. To put it another way, Wild Flag is more like a drug you use to help with withdrawal symptoms and not an outright cure for addiction to Sleater-Kinney. If there were a different overall aesthetic or even more organ dueling with the guitar, it would make all the difference. But I digress. The notion “it's almost as good as a proper new Sleater-Kinney album” is all I think you need to know about Wild Flag to determine whether or not it's for you.

4 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

Album of the Week: Sleater-Kinney- The Hot Rock

'Dark', 'mature', 'complex', and 'difficult' are all terms that often get applied to The Hot Rock. It doesn't have the relatively straightforward, more punk rock influenced sound of their earlier releases but it also doesn't bear the pop or classic rock influences of their later work. No, The Hot Rock sits at the point where the band really started to push their songwriting and musicianship to the fore, bringing forward the influence of Television's interlocking dual guitar interplay and indie rock's willingness to mess with a band's established sound. The subject matter is indeed 'darker', more 'mature', more 'complex', and more 'difficult', but given the right listener and/or the right amount of time, The Hot Rock reveals itself as an album full of memorable songs and intricate guitar rock.

Sleater-Kinney's unique sound is due as much to who they are as it is to their approach to music. Often lumped in with but not fully accepted as part of the early-to-mid 90s riot grrl scene, the band feature a unique two guitar/one drummer set up, with both Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker tuning their guitars down to give them a more bass-y sound. Drummer Janet Weiss has a classic rock heft to her style but still fits in well within the odd, off-kilter arrangements of the band. At the same time, Brownstein's and Tucker's vocals contrasted, Brownstein handling lead vocals with her at times violent wails and emotive power, while Tucker often added sweet relief and counter lines to the main vocals.

The Hot Rock spends all of its first half laying down a heavy gauntlet of ideas and complex rock, songs like 'God Is A Number' questioning both God and science and 'End Of You', which references The Odyssey. With 'Don't Talk Like' the album enters its second half where the band shows tremendous growth: this song says so much about the disintegration of a relationship while remaining quite vague. 'Get Up' examines the frailty of the human body as well as death and the afterlife; similarly, 'The Size Of Our Love', a slow lament, seems to be the story of being in love with someone dying of cancer, possibly even the narrator having cancer as well. Finally, there's 'Quarter To Three', which is the most devastating relationship song the band ever wrote, with its character finally giving up on a love and "goin' to bed at a quarter to three/finally tired, finally empty."

Though I do love Dig Me Out and the rest of the albums of their's that I've heard, I'll always think of The Hot Rock as Sleater-Kinney's best album. It's not their most popular, their most listenable, or their most surprising, but it is their most complex, most interesting, and most rewarding.

Shuffling II

Right, then. It's another installment of Shuffling!!

1) The State by Destroyer: I'm beginning to wonder if I was too hard on Trouble In Dreams when I reviewed it. Subsequent visits to it have revealed an album that is perfectly fine and borderline great on its own terms. But it bears the unfortunate mark of following in the wake of Destroyer's Rubies, an album that I trust future generations will dig from their parents' iTunes libraries or whatever future people are using just as I dug Bringing It All Back Home from my parents's record collections. Anyway, this song is really damn good. I adore the moment around the 2:20 mark where the organ dies away and Dan Bejar comes back in full force. It's magical and one of those effortlessly brilliant songwriting moments that I listen to so much music for in order to experience it as often as possible.

2) Jenny by Sleater-Kinney: One of my friends (Hi, Pat) had a girlfriend named Jenny. I also had a crush on a girl in junior high and her name was Jenny. Somehow I had forgotten about that until just now. Well, anyway, Sleater-Kinney are awesome as usual. This song is almost plodding for them, with a wall of background guitar noise and those crunchy mid 90s indie rock sounding guitars that make me weep with joy. I used to worry about whether or not I like this band so much because they were women, but screw it. It doesn't matter what sex you are if you make music this good.

3) Bite Marks by Atlas Sound: Just as John Lennon's voice had a distinctive sound when ran through a reverb unit, whatever effects are always on Bradford Cox's voice make it unique and all his own. He has a very specific way of singing that's both flat/emotionless and, paradoxically, very emotive and either beautiful or painful. In another decade or so, I think critics and music fans will come to the conclusion that the stuff he's doing within Deerhunter and with his 'solo' project Atlas Sound is essential noise pop, and to this decade what My Bloody Valentine was to the late 80s and early 90s. This song has the same quality that My Bloody Valentine did, of being painfully noisy/loud while also being pretty and entrancing.

4) 61e.CR by Autechre: I remember once drunkenly telling a friend on AIM that Aphex Twin/Richard D. James would be known and appreciated throughout history like Beethoven and the Beatles are today. I think what I meant was how forward thinking and visionary his music is. That kind of thing can equally apply to Autechre, who release an album every so often that is 5 to 10 years ahead of what we're capable of appreciating. I think that their modern music works best for me when I think of it in terms of experimental beatmaking and texture creation instead of the old ambient techno/IDM thing of rhythms and melodies. Draft 7.30 only made sense to me when I thought of it as like a series of austere sonic sculptures instead of an album of songs. Songs like '61e.CR' are named like obscure computer files or viruses and sound like Autechre recorded an album of straightforward techno with block rocking beats and then remixed the whole thing to a ridiculous degree. Still, this song manages a relatively follow-able beat, like funk or hip hop made by/for the cold logic of computers.

5) Winter by The Dodos: What got The Dodos's foot in the door was releasing an album that was compared to Animal Collective circa Sung Tongs. But what kept them in my parlor as they sold me on their music were songs like this, which have a pounding primitive rhythm and incessant acoustic guitar but never sound repetitive or annoying. If Animal Collective can/have approximated organic techno music--making repetitive, highly rhythmic music with acoustic instruments and other sounds that aren't typically associated with the genre--then The Dodos picked up the thread of Sung Tongs, making music that is entirely acoustic but operates like techno would. Kind of. Well, this is still a great song and apropos given the weather in Ohio lately.