It’s an Oscar Extravaganza on Stream Police! Who gets to walk the red carpet this week? Why it’s good ‘ol Bill Shakespeare from the 1998 Best Picture Winner Shakespeare in Love. If that wasn’t enough, listen to Michael and John dish on this weekend’s prestigious award show. Who will take home the gold? Why the listeners of this podcast of course!
What, you thought I was done doing these? No, of course not. The People’s Albums are still going strong and especially now that I’m comin’ back at ya with an album that is, well, probably one of the more irrelevant albums I’ve talked about. But regardless, let’s whip out the congas and dig into an album that has very little use now other than being a very colorful drink coaster.
Album: Supernatural
Artist: Santana
Release Date: June 15, 1999
Copies Sold In The U.S.: 13 Million
Shortly after the release of last year’s Start Together box set, Sleater-Kinney announced that they were returning after a ten year hiatus with a brand new album. The news made me ecstatic, and I don’t think the return of any other defunct rock band could make me feel quite the same way. Sleater-Kinney were a very important band to me, even though I only caught up with them a few years after they’d already broken up. A lot has been written about Sleater-Kinney’s impact on music in general, and many people have similar stories about how important their music was to shaping their taste, their personal politics, or even their identity. While I don’t have a particularly unique story about how I discovered their music or what it meant to me personally, I can say that they’ve opened my mind and rocked my face in a way few bands have. Here’s my take on their discography, including some tentative thoughts on their new album, No Cities to Love.
“Eh, that’s cool I guess. But I don’t know, I never really got into them.”
This — because I am a fucking idiot — was my reaction to last year’s news that the long dormant Sleater-Kinney was finally back together and had a new album on the way. Because, believe me, I tried a few times over the course of Sleater-Kinney’s hiatus to get into them, but I could never quite muster up anything more than liking a few of their songs while still having polite respect for what they meant to the late ’90s/early ’00s. And then I finally got around to hearing The Woods. After a six album run built on well-executed tension between these three superb musicians, The Woods to me feels like the album where (maybe because they knew it’d be their last) Sleater-Kinney just let it all out in a violent, crunchy, and all-encompassingly awesome testament to really loud rock n’ roll. And weirdly enough, this album has worked as a sort of keyhole through which I was finally able to comprehend and appreciate the entire S-K discography, since it’s pretty much all I’d been listening to for a good month or two in preparation for their latest, No Cities To Love.
First off, I have to give props to No Cities To Love for being one of the few “reunion albums” that doesn’t contain a single slower ballad that’s there to remind us that these ladies are an entire decade older than the last time we heard them on record. No, at a punchy 32 minutes, this album never even remotely lets up in terms of intensity, while it’s slowest song is the still-pretty-god-damn-heavy “Fade”. Which is why I feel like a jerk for even using a term like “reunion album” in regards to something as vital as No Cities To Love. Because the fact of the matter is, Carrie Brownstein, Corin Tucker, and Janet Weiss together have this kind of interlocking synergy of sharp angles and unkempt energy that has the power to steamroll any other band in their wake. Which just makes me all the more furious that all three nights they’re playing the Showbox in Seattle sold out almost immediately, and therefore I probably will not be able to seem them crush it live on their upcoming tour.
And while it isn’t terribly surprising that No Cities To Love features a lot of the hallmarks of the Sleater-Kinney sound, it so far stands out to me as being the easiest S-K album to sing along with. However, to say that these choruses merely have hooks seems almost a little demeaning, as they more often than not feel like a call to arms, which just further deepens this band’s innate ability to feel like more than just a band. Of these choruses, the one from “Hey Darling” has stuck with me the most, as it sees Tucker simply declaring that “It seems to me the only thing that comes from fame’s mediocrity”. Which maybe you could poke holes in considering Sleater-Kinney’s guitarist is on television quite frequently, but to me just feels emblematic of this band’s ability to stay indie and stay amazing for so long, and without compromising a thing.
Favorite Tracks: “Surface Envy”, “No Cities To Love”, “Hey Darling”
I’ve been accused of being obsessed with the new. Mostly this is in regard to how I am always trying out new albums on Rdio, to the point that it seems like I never go back and listen to anything more than a year old. It’s a fair accusation, I mean I really don’t spend much time at all listening to classic rock or catching up on movies from the fifties or marathoning important TV shows (that aren’t made by Joss Whedon or part of the Star Trek universe). Video games are a little different. While I still have a vast backlog of games that I’ll probably never catch up with, games are such a heavy time investment that I will go back for them. Last year I went back and played a lot of 2013’s Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate and 2009’s Dragon Age: Origins, among countless other old PC games that I picked up on sale and dipped my toes into.
My point is that unless this is your job, it’s really hard to try to play every game that matters. I don’t know how people do it, because I don’t have an especially busy social life and I still would be exhausted to try to get more than a couple of hours of gaming in on a weekday. So yeah, even though it’s almost February I still have barely touched Divinity: Original Sin, I’m still shooting my way through the early stages of Far Cry 4, and while I own Alien: Isolation, I’ve never even booted it up. Will I get to these games? I hope so. I hope I get to play them and many other great games of 2014 that I didn’t try out yet. Until that time, however, here are the 10 games I liked the most that I actually played last year.
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I’m not so sure about Ant-Man, everybody. Marvel’s been on a hot streak because they’ve always put passionate, talented fans behind the camera for every single one of their movies. This was supposed to be the ultimate realization of that, a project Edgar Wright had been working on since 2006 (that’s two thirds of Boyhood ago!) but now we’re getting something with a modified version of the script from Adam McKay and star Paul Rudd directed by the guy who did Yes Man which is not a movie about a super hero who always gets his way. And I guess all that has dulled my excitement Where have I put my anticipation instead? Find out on this week’s Top Ten Thursday!
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I’d like to apologize to everyone who was anxiously awaiting the unveiling of my list. I’m sorry this is so late. And I’m sorry that I saw so few movies this year. I tried doing a log this year, writing my thoughts on every new film that I saw. Some of these reviews are copied from that (sorry). Others are reviews that I threw together this morning because, holy shit, I still haven’t submitted my list yet! Sorry about that again. So, without further apology, here’s my top ten sorry.
