In my slow roll up to the new Sleater-Kinney record, The Center Won't Hold, out now on Mom+Pop Music, I'm thinking back to 1986. Upon buying and loving Tim and Candy Apple Grey, 19-year-old me had an argument with a D.C. record store dude (before I worked in a bunch of record stores myself), with said dude proudly declaring that he wouldn't even play either of those records since, by signing to Warner Brothers, The Replacements and Husker Du had "sold out" or something like that. There was always that sort of purist streak running around D.C., especially a few years later when Jawbox and Shudder to Think signed to major labels. I still think it's sort of silly to categorically dismiss a record simply because a big company put it out. I mean, The Clash signed to CBS, right? And the term selling out is one that's easy to throw out there, and impossible to define, as a rule. Which is a very long way of saying that The Center Won't Hold is a record that's easy to enjoy and perhaps hard to defend, and it's one that's likely to anger long-time Sleater-Kinney fans. For a band with such a distinctive, corrosive style of rock, there's little on The Center Won't Hold that feels familiar or recognizable, and it's as simple as that.
Produced by St. Vincent (Annie Clark), The Center Won't Hold certainly doesn't sound like anything this trio has done before. And with the recent defection of drummer Janet Weiss, one first goes through this looking for clues as to why she left, even though the clues might be right in front of us, and up in that promo pic of the group covered in make-up. Still, there's lots to love here, with "Can I Go On" having that familiar mix of yearning and fire that the best Sleater-Kinney songs have always had, and with a few other numbers, notably "Reach Out", revealing a band making this new direction work fairly well. So who am I to say that that number sounds like Pat Benatar? Maybe that was the point? Pat was/is pretty bad-ass, right? And for all the production effects that feel stifling in spots, a track like "Restless" is wonderfully simple and direct. When Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker sing, "My heart wants the ugliest thing...", and the guitar-line spirals away like something from an early Cure record, a listener is genuinely moved.
On balance, it's not the songs on The Center That Won't Hold that are really the problem, but the production. While "Bad Dance" probably sounded good at one point, the version that made it to the record sounds like something from a modern Broadway musical, while "LOVE" is at least a bit better, a neat paean to being a punk rocker on the road set to a hook that sounds like something from a Devo record. Now, I love Devo more than the next person, but I just wasn't quite expecting that sort of thing here on a Sleater-Kinney record. And if "The Dog / The Body" has an undeniable power, it's the sort of thing that you'd play for a long-time fan of this band only to have them hard pressed to ever guess that the artist behind it was Sleater-Kinney. And because of that, The Center Won't Hold is marginally recommended, sort of like with a warning that indicates just what a radical departure this one is. And while everything might sound different from here on out, as the group goes forward as a duo, at least Sleater-Kinney are offering up the right takes ("Broken"), and fighting the good fight. It's just that now the sound is less punk and more alt-pop.
The Center Won't Hold is out now via Mom+Pop Music.
More details on Sleater-Kinney via the official website.
[Photo: Mom+Pop Music / Sleater-Kinney]