What Sets Sleater-Kinney Apart
Image: Courtesy Chris Hornbecker
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For the better part of a decade, Sleater-Kinney’s seventh album, The Woods, appeared to be its last. The band, which is playing its second of two shows this week at Revolution Hall tonight (8pm; $50), stood out in Olympia, Washington’s post–riot grrrl scene for its thick and textured sound. Singer Corin Tucker and guitarist Carrie Brownstein were autodidacts like many of their riot grrrl peers. But with the addition of drummer Janet Weiss, who first played on the band’s third record, Dig Me Out, they transcended the genre’s DIY punk sound, catapulting its ethos to a broader audience—so much so that, in 2001, Greil Marcus declared them America’s best rock band in Time magazine.
The Woods, which turned 20 this spring, is not every Sleater-Kinney fan’s favorite album. It marked the band’s jump from a regional punk label to Sub Pop—still an indie, but an indie that had signed a partnership with Warner Bros. And it saw their sound explode with anthemic choruses that are easy to imagine powering up a stadium filled with thousands of people. Tucker howls with a Danzig-like warble, her voice like a saw. Brownstein, who has an affinity for high kicks onstage, conjures a guitar tone like a sparking powerline whipping through the street. “It’s so fucking awesome,” as Chris DeVille recently put it in an anniversary piece for Stereogum.
Then, other projects came up, including Brownstein’s show Portlandia, and it was nearly a decade before the world saw another Sleater-Kinney album. Writing in The New Yorker in 2015, around the release of their reunion album, No Cities to Love, Sasha Frere-Jones compared the restart to 1975 rumors of a Beatles reunion. Drawing out the comparison, he went on: “The band members are as distinct as those in any canonical classic rock band, where each member is sufficiently individuated as to be one step away from being an action figure.” Unlike the Beatles, Sleater-Kinney has stuck together (though Weiss left the group in 2019). Little Rope, the band’s fourth album since reviving, and its 11th since forming in 1994, came out in 2024.
More Things to Do This Week
Extra SPECIAL EVENTS AIDS Walk Northwest
9AM–NOON SAT, SEPT 13 | GOV. TOM McCALL WATERFRONT PARK, FREE
This Saturday brings the 40th anniversary of the Portland offshoot of the legendary AIDS Walk LA, a fundraiser and public march to raise awareness and fight misinformed stigmas surrounding HIV and AIDS. Poison Waters hosts Portland’s walk this year, which is organized by the Cascade AIDS Project, a local nonprofit that provides HIV and AIDS testing and treatment resources for Oregon and Southwest Washington. The organization reported 2,000 attendees last year. Facing over $1 billion in lost funding nationally, thanks to Trump-slashed budgets, organizers are hoping for the biggest crowd yet.
BOOKS Leni Zumas
7PM TUE, SEPT 16 | POWELL’S CITY OF BOOKS, FREE
Zumas, a Portlander, paints a nuanced portrait of this country’s abysmal system of intergenerational care in her third novel, Wolf Bells. In exchange for their help caring for other residents, young people live rent free in a home for the elderly and disabled. A former punk singer runs the place, and a constant stream of jokes fly between age groups. But when a young girl and her disabled cousin, both of whom are minors, turn up on the doorstep, the home’s accepting philosophy of no-questions refuge is put to the test.
VISUAL ART Marie Watt
THRU DEC 6 | JORDAN SCHNITZER MUSEUM OF ART AT PORTLAND STATE UNIVERSITY, FREE
Watt’s work ranges from towering sculptures of Indigenous blankets to giant neon signs blaring her ancestral place name Turtle Island. A Portlander and a member of the Seneca Nation of Indians who also has German-Scots ancestry, Watt is interested in what beloved and familiar objects offer when collaged into artworks—and how mixing artifacts from her own various heritages reflects multicultural identity. The same is true of her printmaking work featured in this traveling exhibition, Storywork. The layered pieces are made in short-run series using techniques like photogravure combined with appliqué objects and gilt foils. While they are mostly flat and ostensibly reproducible, each piece carries the complexities and heirlooms of her room-size installations.
Elsewhere...
- Supported by a $5,000 Portland Arts Project grant, Tennis Courterly, a local newsletter—the physical kind—published a 30-page polemic against pickleball. (Portland Mercury)
- Grant Miller’s Heading Homo Cabaret at queer bathhouse Hawks. (Willamette Week)
