Sleater-Kinney Concert Review Archive / 2001-2006

The Case Western Reserve University Observer, along with having the longest name I’ve ever heard, also has a review of the Sleater-Kinney show. Excerpt here:

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By Kisston Gorgeous

the 2nd nite was a lot more crowded, but i was in better spirits cuz a lot of my friends showed up. amy who i haven’t seen since the last time i saw s-k. and my h.s. buddy annie who goes to college in milwaukee now. i was more happy that i was seeing old faces (as in “long-time, no see” not wrinkley) then seeing s-k.

on the 2nd nite i wanted to be under corin’s microphone. but it didn’t work out that way. i was dead center right in the front. @ least i could see janet. cuz the nite before, one of her cymbals was covering her face. i forgot to wear my watch on the 2nd nite so i had no concept of time whatsoever. i again had a great time shaking my tail to the quails. julianna
(drummer) smiled @ me a couple times. yay! that warmed my heart totally! i had listened to their new album twice on the way to the show so i new the words to a few songs. and i made a fist during “atmosphere.” and jen noticed me and nodded & smiled. yeah, i new what was up!

i don’t know how long the break was b/w the quails and s-k. i was having a ball catching up on lost time w/annie. but, when the lights went off i was expecting 5 min of that weird woo-woo noise. (it was much longer the nite before.) tonite i was not lucky enough to copy of carrie’s setlist. so, i had to use my brain to think of the song titles, which was not an easy task! here’s what i came up/w (please realize this may not be entirely correct. i
hope some1 else is posting the correct setlist):

1) o2
2) oh
3) no more
4) burn don’t freeze
5) one beat (?)
6) the remainder
7) youth decay
8) one beat (?) [yeah, i wrote down this song twice. i think this is where
they actually played "1BT." grrr! i have a bad memory.]
9) turn it on
10) light rail coyote
11) sympathy (?) [totally not!]
12) stay where you are (yes! yes! yes!)
13) combat rock
14) prisstina
15) YNRNRF
16) sympathy [yes this is where they played the song, cuz i wrote down some
of the words "i've got this curse in my hands." and these words are from
sympathy. so, i dunno what they played @ #11.]
17) words & guitar
18) hollywood ending
19) step aside
**ENCORE**
1) little babies
2) little mouth
3) dig me out
4) (did they play a 4th one? i thought they did, but maybe not.)

and then there were none…i was so sad. i was screaming for them not to go and to come back. but but but i did get a chance to meet carrie after the show. i gave her one of my zines and these were her words “thanx. oh and i needed a safety pin, so this’ll come in handy.” (i use safety pins for binding my zine together.) ah, what a nerd. my zine is merely a tool. well, it’s all good. i got a picture w/her and i hope my pics from the 2nd nite
come out all right cuz my battery pretty much crapped out a few songs into s-k’s set. i let it rest, though. so, i’d have some juice left over in case i got to meet s-k.

before i met carrie, i went to the merch booth again. and saw seth and julianna (from the quails) again. i talked to seth for a bit while julianna was talking to a friend. i bought a t-shirt (cuz there’s were $10, which is the price i’m used to paying for band shirts). and once again told them how much they rocked and how good of a bass player he is. then julianna made her way to the booth and she saw me and said hi and gave the hugest hand shake. (i mean a strong handshake!) yay! i had a smile on from ear to ear. i squeezed my way over to the s-k side of the merch booth and yelled to the guy behind the counter if i could get a poster. that’s all i wanted. i was being kinda pushy cuz i wanted to get a signed poster before they sold out again.

i hope the rest of you enjoy seeing s-k and the quails as much as i did. and don’t miss the quails. and remember these words: soon the rest will fall my dear. soon the rest will fall. yr no longer the main attraction. and soon the rest will fall.

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By Kisston Gorgeous

i went to both chicago shows.

the 1st nite i was right underneath carrie’s microphone. i couldn’t see her though cuz they wanted the lights shining on the audience which left me blinded. but, anyway…the quails came on around 6:50 and they played for about 50 minutes. they were totally awesome. i’ve been listening to just them for the past couple days. i think every member of the quails plays fantastically. and i love it when drummers do a lot of singing. i get so jealous cuz i can hardly keep a beat, let alone be singing @ the same time. s-k came on no more than 20 minutes after the quails finished their set. i had a lot much more fun dancing the 1st nite, even though every1 around me was *not* dancing. i @ least had enough room to keep to myself while i was bobbing up and down and shaking all around. the setlist for thur’s show (which i copied from carrie’s list thankfully, cuz i still sometimes forget the names of songs, especially w/the new ones):

1) one beat
2) o2
3) oh
4) get up
5) far away
6) yr no rock n roll fun
7) the remainder
8) start together
9) combat rock
10) turn it on
11) funeral song (which i went absolutely crazy over! i was shaking my head L
to R when the chorus came on. and i sang louder than carrie when the line
“nothing says forever like my very own grave” came around.)
12) lightrail coyote
13) all hand on the bad one
14) words & guitar (mmhhmm!!)
15) sympathy
16) hollywood ending
17) end of you
18) step aside
**ENCORE**
1) bruce cover “the promise land” right?
2) i wanna be yr joey ramone
3) call the doctor
4) dig me out

janet did a much better drum solo on the 1st nite. (she does the drum solo after hollywood ending.) i think it was longer and had more twists and turns on the 1st nite. after the show i went to the merch booth. talked to seth and julianna of the quails. bought both of their albums. bought all of the zines they were selling. actually, i got to do a zine trade, so i only had to pay for 2 zines! so, every1 who has a zine: BRING IT TO THE SHOW AND DO A ZINE TRADE W/THE QUAILS! then after talking to the quails for a bit i went to the s-k side of the merch booth. i refused to by a $15 t-shirt. thank gosh i already have one. i did however by 4 pin-packs b/c i felt that was a good buy. 4 pins for $3. i had to by *something* for my friends who couldn’t make it to the show/s. they sold out of signed posters so i asked janet if there’d be more signed posters the next nite and she said yes. i got her to sign my off-beat CD pocket/sleeve. she seemed annoyed, though. she was trying to talk to this man and they kinda needed her @ the booth and she looked like she didn’t want
to be disturbed. oh well.

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By Autumn Patterson

My girlfriend and I drove down to see the show at Grinnell College the day after the band had played in Minneapolis. We had to drop off a friend in Ames and got stuck in some minor traffic around the Twin Cities, so we didn’t arrive until about 8:45 p.m. When we finally arrived, hoards of young college students were still packed in a “line” several students wide (like a little running brook of Sleater-Kinney fans) inside the Harris Center. We had imagined the Harris Center to be more like an auditorium, but once the few uninterested Grinnell students wearing black and white SECURITY T-shirts finally let us in, we could see that the feel of the room was definitely more high school gym. The pull-down bleachers were pushed up against the wall to create a dance floor and there was a built-in concession area stage left that served free soda and soapy tasting soft water. It reminded me of the episode of Pete & Pete where Luscious Jackson played Little Pete’s middle school dance. The crowd, as far as I could tell, was mostly Grinnell students, quite a few of them drunk and still sipping Boone’s apple wine product out of paper bags in preparation for dancing wild and uninhibited-like.

The Quails opened and when they started to play it became painfully obvious how incredibly short the stage was. There weren’t that many people in front of us, but all I could really see was the top of Mr. Bass Quail’s bald head peeking up over the crowd. They played pretty much the same set as in Minneapolis and warmed up the crowd as far as dancing goes, although I chose to save my own energy for the main event. Instead of shaking my booty, I spent the Quails set trying to spot the biggest Grinnell-grown ‘fro, getting some “punch” for my sweetheart and perusing the merch table. At the end of the Quails set, 6 or 7 students got up on stage and danced like crazy.

Sleater-Kinney started playing around 10:30 and just a few short seconds into the first song, the crowd established a pocket near the front of the crowd center stage for crazy dance moves. To steal Carrie’s phrase from the previous night, the wildest dancers were of the “pogo” variety, with Corin’s favored hip motion dancers gravitating more toward the edges and Janet’s friend-embarrassing dance mongrels dispersed evenly throughout the crowd. The entire set was very charged and powerful – a lot more like a non-stop dance CD, whereas the last tour (All Hands on the Bad One) tended to be sets that were more stop and go, slow and fast.

They played all of One Beat except for Funeral Song plus Little Babies, Joey Ramone, Burn, Don’t Freeze, Turn it On, One More Hour, Youth Decay, YNRRF, #1 Must Have and Start Together. (Note: I didn’t write the setlist down so we recreated it mostly from memory. It may not be entirely accurate.) During #1 Must Have, Corin sang the wrong line–both her and the crowd winced but
she kept on singing and by the time she got around to screaming the chorus again, everyone had forgotten anyway.

I was really pleased to hear so much material from The Hot Rock and Dig Me Out on this tour. Burn, Don’t Freeze was so incredible to hear live–I had heard it once before, but had determined that, with the competing vocals, it just couldn’t work in a live setting. But Carrie’s voice is a lot stronger on this tour, I think, and she helped pull the song together much better than before. As far as songs from One Beat go, Sympathy is probably my favorite live song from the new album. It is to One Beat what Milkshake ‘N Honey was to All Hands and it translates really well to the stage, giving both Carrie and Corin a chance to show off how incredibly powerful and emotional their voices can be on their own and ending with all three singing together and complimenting each other beautifully.

In between two songs, Carrie stopped to encourage the Grinnell campus to exercise their voting rights. No one there was even old enough to remember MTV’s Rock the Vote campaign and everyone just stared blankly at the stage. “Do you guys have a senator you’re backing or something?” Carrie asked, referring to the concert the previous night during which the crowd started shouting about voting for Senator Paul Wellstone of the Green Party. At the Minneapolis show, Carrie responded with “Paul Wellstone is here tonight to see Sleater-Kinney?! Awesome!” But no one at Grinnell College was probably even from Iowa, let alone registered to vote there, so Carrie’s call to arms for voting fell flat.

Before Light Rail Coyote, Carrie proclaimed that it would be a sing-along. Corin and Carrie thanked “John” for putting on the show and mentioned that John could help out on the sing-along since he was a music major. (They must have mentioned the boy 5 or 6 times after that in the set as well. I’m sure they made his day). At the end of the song, the crowd sang “Oh dirty river, come let me in,” until it was obvious that no one could sing and that there weren’t even enough people for us to just be loud. I felt like we all fell short in helping the band to feel like rock stars, but we made up for it when that one random guy started crowd surfing, for sure.

For the encore, they came out and Carrie said they would play three more songs, although they only ended up playing two. The first song Corin introduced as being “the party song for my generation, but you guys look like you’ll dance to anything right now.” They then broke into a cover of the B-52s “Private Idaho” which, while a good song in its own right, did not seem appropriate being covered by Sleater-Kinney. I think that the band lacks the requisite beehives and Casio keyboards for a decent B-52s cover band. Corin was right, though, about the audience being able to dance to anything, especially given that people were even moshing earlier in the set to Prisstina while I just stood there with my mouth agape wondering how that song even made it into the setlist.

The second song of the encore was Words & Guitar. Corin started to lose her voice near the end of the song and during one of the quiet parts of the song she made mention about how John was supposed to be backing her up on this one. That turned out to be the last joke about John of the evening, and the band left the stage around midnight. I had been worried that seeing two shows in a row would be too much but after the Grinnell show, I found myself entertaining the idea of ditching work to drive to Chicago the next day for more of the same.

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By LisaL

so i went to the grinnell show last night, and it was so amazing. I had such a good time. me and a few of my friends drove to grinnell from the quad cities and waited at the doors for almost three hours, during those three hours we heard S-K’s sound check, The Quails sound check, Janet Wiess came out the doors to the venue and walked into an office across the hall while everyone just stared in awe, and right as the doors were opening the band came out to the line and talked with a few lucky fans. I got front row (persistance and waiting pays off) and danced my booty off through the quails set, which, might i add, kicked ass. then when S-K came out everyone started pushing to the front, we were so packed in there wasn’t room to dance (move), the stage came to about mid thigh and i have huge bruises on my thighs from being cramed in…but it was sooo worth it. i was right in front of Corin’s mike and before they started playing i told her i liked her tights and she looked at me and smiled and said thankyou. I’m such a dork. After the show i went to The Quails merch table and got a cd and they were all kind enough to sign it for me and we made small talk about how much energy the show had, and how cool it was that S-K played a free show and lots of people showed up etc….I think it’s safe to say that was one of the best concerts i’ve ever been to, the energy from onstage and throughout the crowd was so awesome. and blah blah blah i’m done.

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In the middle of the Replicator’s very good tour journal is a little snippet about S-K. Complimentary comments for the ladies from a fellow musician.

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by Larry Schussler

There are times when I wonder while I still go to clubs. Standing for long periods bothers my feet and knees, my enlarged prostate makes frequent (and sudden) trips to the bathroom a very real problem and most of the rest of the audience is less than half my age. Last night’s Sleater-Kinney show at First Avenue in Minneapolis provided a resounding answer: I go because I might see and hear something like this.

Before the show I wondered how the songs from One Beat would fare in a live setting. The rather theatrical vocals (e.g. Combat Rock), the occasional weak lyric (Hollywood Ending) and the songs of uneven quality (Light Rail Coyote) caused some doubt, even while the near-perfection of Sympathy, One Beat and Step Aside made me tingle with anticipation. In concert, all of the songs sounded better than on the album. They were written to be played live in front of an enthusiastic, dancing audience like the one last night. The weaker songs didn’t sound as good, but only relative to the better ones. On an absolute scale, they were quite good indeed.

I got to the show early (my wife dropped me off on her way to choir rehearsal, she came to the show later with my youngest daughter) and was rewarded by seeing Corin almost immediately. She was just walking through the club, alone and looking pensive. A little later, I met middle daughter Anjanette. As we were talking, I looked up and saw Carrie playing pinball. (Monopoly machine, she seemed to be doing rather well.) While I’m sure others noticed, we all left her alone. Not long after that, Janet was working the merch table. (Note: shirts are $15 this year. In addition to the white one with pictures on the band that I already had purchased through Kill Rock Stars, there is a light blue one with a singing (or yawning) monkey on the front and the band name on the back. The art looks similar to the orange cat shirt and the band name is in similar type. All 6 CDs were on sale as well as $3 pins and $1 stickers.) I did stop and say hi to Janet and thanked her for coming back.

Opening bands were Family Outing (2 piece plus a dancer) and The Quails. Both played good, tight sets but after seeing S-K I can’t really remember much about them. I mean no disrespect to either band, it is more of a tribute to the powerhouse show by the ladies.

I had been hanging around the edges of the crowd, waiting for eldest daughter Johanna to arrive, but after The Quails ended and I still hadn’t spotted her I thought I had better position myself for the main event. As usual I picked out a spot right in front of Corin’s mic, about 10 people from the stage. Most of those in front of me were short (I’m only 5′ 9″ myself) and the sight lines were good except that Janet was partly behind a cymbal. Anjanette and her friend Dane had spots close to the front on the Carrie side, so even though my entire family was at the show I didn’t have one of them with me to watch.

I can’t keep set lists for S-K shows, I get too excited. They started with Oxygen (as someone else remarked, a great opener) and then Oh! and One Beat. They sounded like they were not quite in synch with each other and appeared to be asking for monitor adjustments. Then they played Turn It On and simply exploded. Everything meshed. The two guitars fit together perfectly, Janet’s propulsive drumming provided the rocket fuel and they were in interstellar overdrive for the rest of the evening.

The one surprise for me was that their vocals have improved. I didn’t think they could improve, since they were already excellent, but Carrie has kicked it up several notches. She handles much more of the lead vocal work on the new songs than the old ones and the quality of her singing, while not up there with Corin’s, is much better than I ever would have thought possible. They also seem completely confident of their ability, relaxed and happy on stage.

They did everything from One Beat except Prisstina and brought back Start Together, Joey Ramone, The End Of You, One More Hour, Words and Guitar, You’re No Rock’n'Roll Fun, All Hands On The Bad One, Call The Doctor and Dig Me Out. (No covers, but I am probably forgetting something.) CTD morphed into DMO as the end of their encore, following a (for them) extended jam. This was nice to hear, but pointed out that instrumental breaks are not their long suit. They excel at bringing all the instrumental and vocal elements together to put across the essence of the songs.

I have to say that the highlight of the evening was Sympathy. When Corin sang the line “… all the mommies with their hearts breaking” there was so much emotion in her voice that I honestly think I would have fallen over had the crowd not held me up. (I am misting up now just thinking about it, incredibly powerful.) As a parent who has thought their child might die, I can really relate to her experience and the way she has turned it into art.

After the show we waited to see if they would be available for autographs and all three of them came out to mingle. It was youngest daughter Lauren’s first show and she was really thrilled to be able to meet the band and get them to sign her ticket. I had each sign their page in the One Beat booklet and floated home.

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By Anjanette

Overall the show was excellent. They played every song from one beat except Prisstina. They opened with Oxygen, which I thought was interesting. They also played turn it on, one more hour, dig me out, joey ramone, the end of you, get up, and call the doctor. A few of the songs featured an extended rock out at the end, going from one song (which I don’t remember) to dig me out. Very awesome.

I was so worried about getting to the show on time, but when I got there, I just walked right up and got a spot in the second row on the left side of the stage, by Carrie. It was the best spot I’ve ever had at an sk show. As far as the opening bands, I didn’t really like Family Outing. I think it would have been better if they’d had a live drummer. I liked the Quails quite a bit, if only for the outfits.

sk. Well, here are some highlights:

1. ‘turn it on’ was the fourth song played. that was a surprise, and it was amazing. made me realize why I still like it.
2. Carrie smiled at me!!!! She really did. I was dancing. a nice, big smile, too.
3. There was this gross sweaty guy who barged into our little group and started moving around a lot and dancing and bumping into people. He smelled absolutely horrible, and his sweat smudged my glasses. I really felt threatened when he was there, and I kept looking at the security guy to take him away. Eventually he did. thank goodness.
4. I’ve never really liked “dig me out” but after the encore last night, I’ve changed my mind.
5. I still don’t like ‘lightrail coyote’. I didn’t move at all until the part near the end.
6. At the beginning I saw Carrie playing monopoly pinball. I stood there and watched her for awhile
7. and, as my mom commented after the show, “Corin does have a cute butt.”
8. there wasn’t much onstage banter, except for this little gem, talking about the audience dancing:
corin: I prefer dancing with your hips, moving your hips around
carrie: and I prefer the pogo, which you can do if you’re not good with your ass (or something)
janet: and I prefer the dancing that emarrasses your friends. . . the kind that makes them close their eyes, etc.

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