Audio files

By Times staff
© St. Petersburg Times
published September 22, 2002

SLEATER-KINNEY, ONE BEAT (KILL ROCK STARS) America's best rock band? That's a pretty heavy title, but Time said it's so of Sleater-Kinney, the dynamic all-chick trio from Olympia, Wash., now based in Portland, Ore. Fans of the band know the magic; the ladies certainly changed my so-called rock 'n' roll life back in 2000 when I saw them perform at Ladyfest in their hometown.

Didn't I rack up the frequent-flyer miles for four more gigs in New York and San Fran?

Crazy? Obsessed? Nah, not when music makes you feel this alive. One Beat is the band's sixth album and finds the trio still fresh, still invigorated and still amused by their muses after taking a year off so singer-guitarist Corin Tucker could properly have a baby. Motherhood hasn't tempered Tucker any. Her singing is blissfully untethered on this album, and not just for her punkish wail but for new forays into bluesy terrain. Her bandmates, singer-guitarist Carrie Brownstein and drummer Janet Weiss -- yep, not a bassist in the house -- kept busy with film and music projects.

Back together, the trio's spunk is still sharp, as are the insights. Sleater-Kinney has always played like punks with thumbs to noses concerning the icky factors of a culture too pop, too polished and way too patriarchal. One Beat finds S-K in the same proto-feminist and provocative mode but continuing to horse around with the toys of its genre. This record, like the last, All Hands on the Bad One, softens more of the grit, replacing it with wit and sassy ingenuity. Hear the fun 1960s girl group harmonies? The wonderful hand claps and horns? What's this on Funeral Song? A theremin? Get a load of the real live boy singer on Prisstina, a S-K first! That's Stephen Trask of Hedwig and the Angry Inch fame.

The album isn't all fun and games; Sympathy details the premature birth of Tucker's son. Several songs allude to last year's terrorist attacks, with the girls frowning on the Bush administration and war.

One Beat is another step in the right direction for America's greatest rock band. Kick your feet up, listen to all six Sleater-Kinney albums in a row and know: Rock 'n' roll is alive, and it will keep us so.

-- GINA VIVINETTO, Times pop music critic

COLDPLAY, A RUSH OF BLOOD TO THE HEAD (CAPITOL) The good news is that Coldplay is not as out of ideas as the first single off its second release suggests. The ideas are just couched differently than on the British band's first release, Parachutes, and the single is not indicative of the new direction.

In My Place has a distinctly radio-ready feel. The rest of A Rush of Blood to the Head is a departure into trancy, atmospheric guitars and keyboards in the vein of the Church. The subtle, empty spaces that often added tension to Coldplay's first album are mostly filled in with production elements, and the soulful vocals of Chris Martin sometimes struggle to emerge. Coldplay establishes its new tack immediately on the album's first song, Politik, and after second-slotted In My Place, perhaps the album's weakest song, it continues with a collection of dark-room music.

On this album, Coldplay sounds far more like recent Radiohead than it did when it elicited such comparisons after Parachutes. (Daylight could have been a B side on Kid A). And as with Radiohead's recent work, A Rush of Blood to the Head, though quite pretty and ethereal in places, sometimes squelches the Johnny Buckland guitar hooks that made Parachutes memorable.

Notable exceptions occur with Buckland's work on God Put a Smile on Your Face and Martin's sad-man singing and piano on The Scientist. Green Eyes, with layered keyboards replaced by acoustic guitar, also shines, and Warning Sign and Amsterdam harken back to Trouble from Parachutes.

More serious, more somber, perhaps a bit less accessible, Coldplay at least displays a willingness to experiment after a wildly successful first record. B-.

-- BRANT JAMES, Times staff

AIMEE MANN, LOST IN SPACE (SUPEREGO RECORDS) Three years after hitting a peak with her brilliant self-released album Bachelor No. 2, Aimee Mann returns with her most subdued collection of songs. Lost In Space offers more of her customary ruminations on love, life and why things fall apart. It's the same thematic seam that Mann has deftly mined throughout her career, but this time the vibe is more relentlessly downbeat.

In the lead track, Humpty Dumpty, she offers this jaunty lyric: "All the perfect drugs and superheroes/Wouldn't be enough to bring me back to zero." But even as Mann plunges into darkness, she retains her knack for cutting riffs on romantic ambivalence and longing. "I've got love and anger/They come as a pair/You can take your chances/But buyer beware," she warns in Real Bad News. And in the exquisite Invisible Ink, she wishes in desperation that she were a ghost, "Who's trying to move your hands/Over some Ouija board in the hopes/I can spell out my name."

Lost In Space is Mann's first solo disc without multi-instrumentalist and longtime collaborator Jon Brion. Without Brion's technicolor chromatic shadings, some of Mann's melodic hooks take a little longer to sink it. But after a few spins, her usual Beatle and Badfinger obsessions come to the surface in glorious detail, particularly in the crying slide guitar phrases that pepper the album. Somewhere, the ghost of George Harrison is smiling. A

-- LOUIS HAU, Times staff

ANI DIFRANCO, SO MUCH SHOUTING, SO MUCH LAUGHTER (RIGHTEOUS BABE RECORDS) I am an unabashed Ani DiFranco fan. I think DiFranco, 31, is among the strongest lyricists of her generation, and I admire her fierce, independent vision. DiFranco's last live album, 1997's incendiary Living in Clip, was a visceral testament to her riveting performances. So Much Shouting, So Much Laughter documents DiFranco's marked maturity. She is still a magnetic live performer and a prolific artist, releasing four studio albums since 1997. But the double disc's tracks are underwhelming, as are many of the arrangements of newer material; the latter disappointingly resemble the recorded versions.

Eight of the album's 23 songs are culled from last year's opus, Revelling: Reckoning. The performances are adequate, except for a devastatingly beautiful take on Grey and a dramatic rendering of the spoken-word-cum-performance art piece Tamburitza Lingua. (Just pop on Revelling: Reckoning instead.)

That said, DiFranco's strengths as a poet shine in her spoken-word pieces. My IQ positively simmers. Two of the three unreleased songs included, Shrug and Welcome To, are unremarkable live. The third, Self Evident, is a chilling post-9/11 rumination on American foreign policy. DiFranco's polemic is tempered by a cool, jazzy backdrop from her band, expanded to include a full brass section. The potent poem redeems the lagging second disc but is not enough to make the album an Ani essential. B-

-- BRIAN ORLOFF, Times staff

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