The Return of Sleater-Kinney

Sleater-Kinney

Top Show: Sleater-Kinney at Riverside Theater, Sunday, February 15

No Cities to Love, the first new album from Sleater-Kinney in a decade, refutes the notion that a reunited band must truck in sad nostalgia, grab for as much cash as possible, or compromise core principles.

Then again, in its first run from 1994 to 2006, the Pacific Northwest trio smashed through other commonplace notions. Women can’t rock as powerfully as men? Corin Tucker’s voice alone shouted otherwise; Tucker and Carrie Brownstein’s guitars and Janet Weiss’s drums added kick to the argument.

Feminism is antithetical to rock ‘n’ roll? Nobody made that claim for Pearl Jam or Bad Religion, to cite two manly, non-misogynistic groups, and despite S-K’s importance to riot-grrrl music and politics, the seriousness rarely turned to solemnity. There were populist pleasures as well as polemics:

Those pleasures emerged more as Sleater-Kinney went along—its final long-player until now, 2005’s The Woods, bounced off classic-rock tropes—and reverberated through underground rock after the band announced a hiatus.

The reverberations even found amplification in the S-K alumni’s later projects, like Wild Flag (Brownstein and Weiss’s band with Helium’s Mary Timony and the Minders’ Rebecca Cole) and its one glorious self-titled full-length, or Tucker’s “middle-aged mom” (her quote) leadership of the Corin Tucker Band.

Still, as Sub Pop reissued the back catalog last year, the release-date revelation of No Cities to Love was much more exciting…because Sleater-Kinney was, is, and should be about moving forward.

The energy, ferocity, verve, and brevity of No Cities to Love definitely bring the old momentum back to new, noticeably different life. Sleater-Kinney is present.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLwD1to3dZU

Thursday, February 12: Fleetwood Mac at BMO Harris Center

“I never met anybody who didn’t like Rumours,” Lester Bangs wrote in 1981, four years after the Fleetwood Mac album sold so many copies that Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks et al. could’ve made the follow-up 40 minutes of farts and it would’ve sold a couple million copies anyway. (The actual follow-up, Tusk, wasn’t bad.)

With the return of keyboardist, singer and songwriter Christine McVie, who had retired from the band around 1998, the Rumours lineup is back in all its formerly rift-inducing, ego-tripping, lover-swapping glory.

(Let us not forget that Ms. McVie and bassist John McVie divorced amid the success of Rumours, for which she wrote, among other songs, “You Make Loving Fun,” an ode to an extramarital paramour.)

While the members have been developing new material, it’s the intimate  frisson of the old days that everybody who likes “the Mac” will try to hear in songs like this:

Friday, February 13: The B-52’s at Northern Lights Theater, Potawatomi Hotel & Casino

When the Black Eyed Peas exhort crowds to have a good time, their plastic relentlessness makes a “good time” seem about as much fun as mandatory attendance at a political rally. The B-52’s, in bold contradistinction, appear to be having fun already and simply want everyone else to join the celebration.

Since 1979, when the first B-52’s album came out, changes drastic (especially the 1985 death of founding member Ricky Wilson) and minor have interrupted the festivities, and later albums, including the most recent studio disc, 2008’s Funplex, don’t have the old pep. They nevertheless remain among the bands likeliest to get a party started without stating that they’re getting a party started.

The single that popped the cork:

Friday, February 13: Nikki Lane at Cactus Club

When registering the current health of country music, consider a roughly literal translation of cherchez la femme: a woman is the best indicator of pulse and temperature., whether she is a slickly produced and weight-monitored lady like Miranda Lambert or a deliberately nostalgic rebel like Nikki Lane.

Lane grew up in South Carolina and loved punk and Motown as much as she loved country & western, but a bad breakup in NYC pushed her toward honky-tonk music and a move to Nashville. Although Black Keys frontman Dan Auerbach produced her second album, 2014’s All or Nothin’, the watchful spotlight sticks to Lane’s twangy vocals and sharp tongue.

Saturday, February 14: All Them Witches at Cactus Club

Have you ever enjoyed a band and then been told insistently, by a fellow fan, that the feeling he gets from the band is deeper than yours thanks to marijuana or mushrooms? Yeah, well, All Them Witches can get you high, or at least make you feel as though you’re high, without pharmaceuticals.

On two LPs issued since 2012, the group has demonstrated that Nashville’s alternative scene remains healthy (for more evidence and a different alternative style, see previous paragraphs on Nikki Lane), and that rock music doesn’t have to stumble and shamble to produce a nice, woozy feeling.