3. One Beat (2002)
As Tom Breihan noted in his excellent 10-year commemoration of One Beat, circumstances both political and profoundly personal influenced its creation. While Sleater-Kinney were dedicated chroniclers of the individual’s experience, the 9/11 strikes and the Bush Administration response suffused the band’s writing sessions, undertaken after Tucker returned from a hiatus. (She had given birth five months prior to a baby born nine weeks early.) Tucker rejoined the group with a singular experience of motherhood. The combination of themes could easily have led to some disjointed writing and/or sequencing, but the three responded to the challenge in classic riot grrrl form: They linked the personal and the political. “Far Away” opens with the image of Tucker, her nurse, and her baby on a couch, riveted to the televised images of apocalyptic return fire. Muted, curlicuing guitar breaks mirror her holding her breath, praying that the sky “doesn’t rain on my family tonight.” “Step Aside” offers a domestic couplet worthy of needlepoint (“This mama works till her back is sore/ But the baby’s fed and the tunes are pure”) but can’t shake the outside sights. The second verse is a full-on Temptations-style raveup, with a full-gospel Tucker directly addressing her bandmates while engaging in a bit of call-and-response replete with “whoo-hoo-hoo”s. It’s a testament to Tucker’s raw power that lines like “shake a tail for peace and love” don’t land as goofy appropriation or goopy sentiment.
“Step Aside” is just one piece of evidence attesting to her sky-high vocal confidence. The force of her singing recalls those early records, but all through One Beat you can practically hear her assume the weight of capturing something immense. She uses her full range, alternately sneering and cajoling, cooing and searching. Brownstein and Weiss — who continues to fully inhabit the soundscape, even adding cowbell at one point — contribute their most ironically angelic harmonies yet. On the lyrical front, their writing sessions yielded evocative imagery both concrete (as on “Light Rail Coyote,” the crashing, sawtoothed tribute to surviving Portland) and figurative (the “meaning in sores” and “grammar of skin” in “Sympathy”). Speaking of “Sympathy,” it’s simply a tour de force, a searing picture of Tucker’s battle for hope in the light of her son’s premature birth. She digs out a deliberate, bluesy howl unprecedented in her recorded history while also providing her own high-pitched hoots. “There’s no righteousness in your darkest moment,” she cries, her bandmates’ defiant “hey”s slamming the point home. Examinations of parenthood are rare enough in indie rock, but this sort of anguished parental grappling is without peer.
On One Beat, Sleater-Kinney had pushed their grammar of rock about as far as it would go. Not every track is a triumph; the trite “Hollywood Ending” trades in the kind of laceration that was Courtney Love’s territory at this point, and “Prisstina” is a third-person story – not the band’s strongest suit — tricked out with exotica touches. The band was still in it to win, but they were ready to strike out for new territory.
