Link to our Facebook
Link to our Instagram
Link to our TikTok

Live Review: FLASHBACK: Sleater-Kinney 'One Beat'

18 June 2012 | 9:00 am | Hannah Story

It was a silly move letting our Hannah Story talk riot grrls. She gets a little bit overexcited with this Sleater-Kinney flashback.

Boss finally let me write about angry grrl music. YES! Here at PURPLE SNEAKERS we're all not-so-secret riot grrls (even the boys are riot grrls) and sometimes we get empowered listening to tunes such as these. Sometimes you got to break up all the twee indie goodness with a little bit of unbridled punk. It's just how it's done.

Let's talk SLEATER-KINNEY. They played at Big Day Out back in 2006. My dad went. I didn't, because I was only 13. He said they ruled, because they wail, and "as if a woman can play a guitar like that." (Actually, a lot of women can play guitars like that. WE CAN DO ANYTHANG.) And then he went out and bought me their most-recent, their final, their then-current album, The Woods. And so the love grew for this feisty grrl music. And then they disbanded later that year. Sob.

‘One Beat’ is the title track from their 2002 album, which gave them widespread commercial acclaim. Corin Tucker wails in this track. Her vocal style is deliberately harsh; you are forced to pay attention. She is a sonic push for energy, and she explodes like the sun. This high-energy passionate track makes a great song to yell at the top of your lungs, in rebellion, in spite, for fun in the shower, anything goes. This kind of harsh poetic talent is something worth really cherishing, a fleeting rarity in this hyper-convoluted internet age. On this track, Carrie Brownstein’s vocals also feature. She has dropped hints, both in 2010, in this year about the band reuniting. Fingers crossed.

Plug into the latest music with our FREE weekly newsletter

If you think like Thomas Edison, could you invent a world for me? Now all that’s on the surface are bloody arms and oil fumes.” SO POLITICAL. These girls were right on target, with a jangly guitar riff, some tambourine and slamming drums punctuating ‘One Beat’. The chorus marks a departure from each politically-motivated verse; it surfs out into a more cruisy harmonising tune, quiet and bashful, utterly at odds to verses’ fury. And sometimes it's necessary to let your politics out in music. And sometimes it's necessary to give artists cred for doing so. Like now.

So, my feminine and not-so-feminine friends, next time you're sitting around reading some literary smut, say Anais Nin, put this track, put this album, put their entire discography on your record player and you will possibly have the most liberated time of your darn life.

Words by Hannah Story.