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SUCH A STRONG FIRST SINGLE/OPENER!!! sleater-kinney u done it again, still following the vibe of the past few albums, but doing it in the right wayz. *.* mezmerized. lovely..
Favorite track: Hell.
lcyoung
What has been generalized in the media as a ‘grief album’ has brought so much light to the world since its release. There is a Sleater-Kinney song for every mood I’m in and Little Rope is no exception! I find myself relating to the narratives of these songs more than any of their other work. Carrie & Corin dug deep with this record and made truly one of their best albums to date. Thank you both for sharing so much of yourselves with the world. ♡
Favorite track: Untidy Creature.
dbuckner82
I am in awe at the excellence of Little Rope, which is how I could start my review of every single album that Sleater-Kinney has put out. Brownstein and Tucker are one of the greatest musical duos to ever practice the craft, and this album, this wonderful gift to the world. goes deep. Open your heart to these songs; they put theirs into them.
Favorite track: Say It Like You Mean It.
There is about grief the necessary aftertaste of dreaming. In the wake of sudden loss – a moment, a person, a way of being brought violently to an end – the thing lost is gone but not its outline, a strange unstable place in which festers all manner of strange unstable thinking. The rules of reality temporarily subside, and mourning makes of the world a negative space.
Plunged without warning into that space, Sleater-Kinney returns with Little Rope, one of the finest, most delicately layered records in the band’s nearly 30-year career. To call the album flawless feels like an insult to its intent – it careens headfirst into flaw, into brokenness, a meditation on what living in a world of perpetual crisis has done to us, and what we do to the world in return. On the surface, the album’s ten songs veer from spare to anthemic, catchy to deliberately hard-turning. But beneath that are perhaps the most complex and subtle arrangements of any Sleater-Kinney record, and a lyrical and emotional compass pointed firmly in the direction of something both liberating and terrifying: the sense that only way to gain control is to let it go.
In the Autumn of 2022, Carrie Brownstein received a call from Corin Tucker, who herself had just received a call from the American embassy in Italy. Years earlier, Brownstein listed Tucker as her emergency contact on a passport form, and while she had since changed her phone number, Tucker had not. The embassy staff were desperately trying to reach Brownstein. When they finally did, they told her what happened: While vacationing in Italy, Brownstein’s mother and stepfather had been in a car accident. Both were killed.
In the months that followed, Brownstein took solace in an act that felt deeply familiar – playing guitar. “I don’t think I’ve played guitar that much since my teens or early twenties,” she says. “Literally moving my fingers across the fretboard for hours on end to remind myself I was still capable of basic motor skills, of movement, of existing.”
As Brownstein and Tucker moved through the early aftermath of the tragedy, elements of what was to become the emotional backbone of Little Rope began to form – how we navigate grief, who we navigate it with, and the ways in which it transforms us. Sometimes the process of putting the songs together involved Tucker and Brownstein alone in a room with nothing more than a couple of guitars and amplifiers – a process unchanged since the band started recording in the mid-90s. Sometimes songs that started out quiet slowly transformed into something triumphant. Sometimes the triumphant ones turned out to be quiet songs in disguise.
The result is a collision of certainty and uncertainty that’s evident from the first few spare seconds of the record’s opening track, “Hell,” where over an agoraphobic expanse of tone and a trickle of chords, Little Rope’s emotional thesis statement begins to take form:
Hell don’t have no worries
Hell don’t have no past
Hell is just a signpost when you take a certain path
It’s a restrained, controlled prologue, but control is fleeting. A few seconds later, well, all hell breaks loose.
I just started listening to this album today and am IN LOVE! Every track is perfect.
I'm slightly sad I didn't start listening to boygenius until but happy to be a fan of their music <3 lissie_a
Sometimes, an album comes along that feels fresh and well-work-comfortable at the same time. This is one of those. The music just feels right. The lyrics touch with a deep connection. And with every play, it feels more and more like a pair of broken-in boots and well-worn jeans. audioamore
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