Sleater-Kinney: "Bury Our Friends"
One great rock song in, and Sleater-Kinney 2.0 is an audibly purposeful return: a looping and instantly memorable Carrie Brownstein riff, her iconic vocal overlap with Corin Tucker, and Janet Weiss‘ swoop carrying us into the future. Of course, they’ve all kept active since Sleater-Kinney ended in 2006—Tucker with solo records and an as-yet-unrevealed collaboration with R.E.M.’s Peter Buck, Weiss playing in Quasi and the Jicks—and Brownstein was writing some of the best songs of her career with Wild Flag, complementing her well-earned fame on “Portlandia”, which now precedes her. “Creativity is about where you want your blood to flow,” Brownstein told NPR today. “Because in order to do something meaningful and purposeful there has to be life inside of it.”
The aliveness is palpable on “Bury Our Friends”. As ever, there is no direct line to be drawn to any previous formulation of their sound. But working with a longtime collaborator, the producer John Goodmanson, there are more hints at the charged and streamlined power of the Dig Me Out era than the epic proportions of 2005′s The Woods. Rather, this clear-sighted shout-along chorus makes Sleater-Kinney sound as if they indeed roam the Earth with us, reborn but ever-conscious of worldly matters, critiquing the inert dread of “our own Gilded Age” but never weighed down by the details: “Exhume our idols! Bury our friends! We’re wild and weary but we won’t give in!” In 2006, Sleater-Kinney offered no tangible reason to believe their energy had diffused, but it continues here, as if no time has passed at all.
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