SLEATER-KINNEY + Mary Timony
London ULU 28th July 2000
A sell out crowd for the biggest date of
Sleater Kinney's UK tour, and although there are evidently a lot of
Americans in London for the summer who've come along, this is still a
fair reflection of their growing status in this country.
Mary Timony, who some of you may know from her old band Helium, warms
up the audience with a solo set of meandering prog-rock. As far as I
could tell most of it is from her new album 'Mountains' which carries
on from where Helium's last release 'The Magic City' left off, in other
words, left-field American indie guitar music meets early 70s English
prog rock. Obviously not to everyone's taste, but she gets a
surprisingly warm reception, especially when Carrie Brownstein from SK
adds a bit of extra guitar to the proceedings.
On a good day Sleater-Kinney are in my opinion one of the most exciting
live bands in the world, and tonight they don't disappoint me. In an
effort to blend as much of their new-ish album 'All Hands on the Bad
One' with their fine back catalogue, they play a longer set than usual,
and they just manage to keep up the intensity for nearly 90 minutes.
The most impressive material from the new album - 'All Hands on the Bad
One', 'The Ballad of a Ladyman', and the pop classic 'You're no Rock n
Roll Fun', draw the biggest response although the highlights from 'Dig
Me Out' are my personal faves. Maybe it's because they were the first
SK songs I ever heard, but 'Words And Guitar', 'Dig Me Out' and the
almost impossibly exciting 'Turn It On' are fantastic.
Even this late in the tour Corin Tucker is in fine voice and ably
assisted by Carrie on guitar and the ultra cool Janet Weiss on drums,
they make the criticisms of their minimal line-up pale into
insignificance. So what if there's no bass!?
Extra
points too, for mucking around with the male rock heritage on the
encore's cover of the old Creedence Clearwater Revival tune 'Fortunate
Son'. Like Patti Smith's 'Gloria' they understand that there's no sense
in changing the gender of the song to make their point, they just claim
it as their own.