A MUSIC REVIEW: Sleater-Kinney-Little Rope

I consider Sleater-Kinney to be one of the best alternative and punk rock acts of all time, their album run in the mid to late 90's to the mid 2000's. Culminating in their masterpiece The Woods (2005) is possibly one of the best album runs in rock history.

They broke up after the woods, but returned 10 years later for the release of the album No Cities to Love. A pretty good album, that while it didn't hold a candle with their classic stuff, still had a lot of the energy and edge that made Washington's band so great in the first place. However, signs of tiredness and uninspiredness were already there. And these signs got worse on following albums like the boring The Center Won't Hold (2019), and then their life-long drummer Janet Weiss, who was an essential part of the band's sound, left the band, and the result was the even more boring Path of Wellness (2021). The energetic, raw and punky sound of the band was all but a thing of the past, replaced with boring, lifeless, almost corporate indie rock that puts anyone with a small modicum of taste to sleep. So now they have a brand new album, released yesterday (All my troubles seemed so far away...ok i'll stop). And I listened to it. Now, it's not as bad as the other 2 albums, honestly no album of theirs is BAAAAAAD, they’re bland, lifeless, beige. And this album is this too, just for the more enjoyable side of bland, beige slop.

There are some okay-ish and catchy songs here, like Needlessly Wild, and Say It Like You Mean It, as well as the opener Hell and Hunt You Down. Corin Tucker’s vocals are pretty good, great even, possibly the only really outstanding part of this project, some riffs are fine, they sound like stock riffs, but they’re okay. I have nothing properly negative to say, but I really run out of positive things to talk about in this album. It’s so bland, it’s so passe, everything is so overproduced to be more, “more powerful”, “more triumphant”, “more uplifting” and yet nothing really works that way, it feels like an inflatable castle that really wants to believe that it’s the Alhambra. And it doesn’t really work that way, and this gets much worse in the last song Untidy Creature, which most people think it’s the best song on the album, but I think it’s the worst. Most songs in this album sound like car commercials, which is already kinda bad. But this song is worse in that sense, it sounds like a perfume commercial. I can’t really explain how, but the whole vibes, the production, the style of the track, it really gets on my nerves.

It’s not the worst album ever, in fact, it kinda surpassed my expectations, sure they weren’t super high but, it’s pretty decent background music, the problem is, Sleater-Kinney wasn’t background music, listen to any song of the self-titled, or Dig Me Out or The Woods, these songs were absolutely overflowing with energy and edge and fun and joy and these things aren’t really here. And that’s a real fucking bummer. Better than the last two albums, worse than everything else, nothing really to say anymore other than this.

SCORE:6.0