sleater-kinney

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I Go Walking in my Sleep: Two Songs about the Same Desolate Time of Night

May 18, 2009 in Features | No comments

Sleater-Kinney, “A Quarter to Three” (The Hot Rock, 1999)

Elliott Smith, “2:45 A.M.” (Either/Or, 1997)

Seventeen-year-old me freaked out when he realized two of his favorite artists had written songs about the same alarmingly specific thing. Neither is especially cheery, but Sleater-Kinney’s take is definitely the more anxious, perhaps because its bleary narrator never quite lets go of the doomed hope that things will get better. Smith, on the other hand, is serene—reality seems to crumble around him, and yet he strides ahead with conviction, strangely at peace in his own self-destruction.

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Come On and Turn, Turn It Up: Two Songs Made Great by Janet Weiss’s Drumming

December 29, 2008 in Features | No comments

Sleater-Kinney, “Dig Me Out”

Bright Eyes, “Hot Knives”

Janet Weiss pulled her weight when she joined Sleater-Kinney; her drumming on 1997’s Dig Me Out crystallized a tightness and tautness that the band had only hinted at before, and over the course of four more records became as essential to their sound as anything dueling frontwomen Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein were coming up with. It’s nice to know, then, that her talents are still being put to use; a year after S-K announced an indefinite hiatus, Weiss popped up in the ever-rotating Bright Eyes backup band to keep time on the second single from 2007’s Cassadaga. “Hot Knives” is the kind of exact kind of sprawling, grandiose stuff we’ve all come to expect from Conor Oberst, and yet Weiss makes her influence amply felt with a beat that sounds like a hundred fills strung together. It’s something few drummers would dare to keep up for four and a half minutes.

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