"DAMN YOU!" Tucker shouts back, and you're in a larger realm, more dangerous and far more promising, a place where it feels as if anything can happen. On Call the Doctor-what a title for a piece of music that means to call everything into question-you can hear this moment in any of the first five songs: the title tune, "Hubcap," "Anonymous," "Stay Where You Are," but most immediately in "Little Mouth." Two guitars make a pulse, and Brownstein floats two words on it: "Damn you!" she snaps, and you feel the song take its shape. It seems much too big, too much in motion: Onstage three people are drawing a diagram of the big bang, every particle of the universe flying away from every other, but in the audience a diagram is the last thing it feels like. Corin Tucker shuts her eyes-scrunches them shut-Carrie Brownstein starts moving her arms and legs, and instantly the noise they're making seems abstracted from their mouths, fingers, bodies, instruments. But I've never seen such a leap in such a moment. As on that album, within seconds their music was complete.Īs is proper and pro forma in a small punk club, Sleater-Kinney come onstage and fiddle and tune with the approximate glamour of people sweeping the floor then, with a vague sort of apology at the necessary separation performance puts between musicians and audience, they begin playing. It was only the second show of the twenty-five-city tour, but the band had its new songs from the shocking Call the Doctor (Chainsaw), its second album. Certainly they were stronger this March 21 at the Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco, with Gogin, than at an earlier show in the same shelter-in-the-storm spot with original drummer Lora Macfarlane. In the two shows I've seen Sleater-Kinney throw at small, rapt crowds over the past year, the power in the combo was so stark, so focused, it seemed most of all implicit-as if they weren't using close to all they had, just what they needed. Still can't believe Corin sings that way every night. the sound system was crap but they overcame it. Everything got underway late, which may have added to their complete FEROCIOUSNESS. There were about 100 people there, mostly 18 + under riot grrrls + the queer punk youth who seem to live at the Fireside. Tuesday night's was a free show at the Fireside Bowl, a bowling alley-cum-punk rock venue whose seediness is unmatched by any other venue I've been to (fluorescent lighting, stained dropped ceiling, the smell of cigarettes/beer/feet dating from the mid-'60s. "They played two shows here + both were good. It was a get-in-the-van odyssey that saw guitarist Carrie Brownstein of Olympia, Wash., and guitarist Corin Tucker and drummer Toni Gogin of Portland, Ore., perform in punk clubs, record stores, college spaces, a church, and a sushi bar. "Just wanted to drop you a line, post-Sleater-Kinney onslaught," my friend Lisa Bralts of Cargo Records wrote on April 25, after the Northwest trio finished the Chicago turn of its first national tour.
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