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TICKETS 🎟️ truewest.info/Kinney25On-Sale: Friday, May 30th at 10am PST
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Little Rope
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.
That interplay of lyrical and musical moods gives the record an immense depth. Even the catchiest hooks are hiding something. The album’s second track, “Needlessly Wild,” starts out delicious, the single-syllable “wild” bending like taffy. But then the lyrics betray something a little more malicious, a little more marked by pain, and soon “I’m needlessly wild” festers into “I’m needless and wild, needless and wild.”
In many ways, Little Rope unleashes one of Sleater-Kinney’s most potent weapons: the shattering emotional range of Tucker’s vocals. In an album so centered on the vulnerability required to face the world as it is, Tucker manages to find her way from composure to its utter absence, and what she conjures is a series of visceral turns, a sharper, heavier manifestation of a rawness that’s always been there, most notably on the band’s early landmark record, Dig Me Out. Perhaps the most unforgettable of these moments comes near the very end of the album, in the brilliant closing track, “Untidy Creature” – a song that almost didn’t make it onto the record, but ends up being the perfect coda, at once the biggest-sounding track on the record and its most lyrically intimate:
But here’s too much here that’s unspoken
And there’s no tomorrow in sight
Could you love me if I was broken
There’s no going back tonight
Then the chorus gives way, and in its place a deep, desperate wail that closes one of the most honest and soul-bearing albums by one of modern rock’s most vital bands.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
1300 SE Stark St, # 110, Portland, OR, United States, Oregon 97214
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