Sleater-Kinney - All Hands on the Bad One

Bad One finds Sleater-Kinney making a big addition to its musical arsenal: harmony. It tinkered with it on 1999's The Hot Rock, but the concept is now fully realized. "Leave You Behind" is the best example of such technique. Brownstein's staple guitar line opens the song, Weiss takes lead vocals, and Tucker chimes in beautifully for a multilayered chorus that comes off like a Beach Boys/Pixies conjoined twin.

Never fear, diehard fans—the intensity that characterized the previous albums remains. Corin Tucker's voice still sounds like a rubber band stretched almost to the point of breaking. The dense sound created by Weiss' percussive attacks and Tucker and Brownstein's guitar lines, which are so tightly intertwined that their axes almost seem welded together, leave you wondering, "Who needs a bass?"

The new adrenaline-saturated songs continue to please. "#1 Must Have" is a revolutionary call for women "to invent" that criticizes the new testosterone-fueled generation for the Woodstock '99 spectacle: "And will there always be concerts where women are raped?" "Acid Tooth" is a crash course in the Sleater-Kinney formula. Enigmatic lyrics ("My teeth are cutting you out") plus persistent drums plus expressive guitar lines plus operatic vocals add up to one hell of a rock song. It's worth the two-and-a-half-minute wait for the claustrophobic end. With nowhere to go but up and out, the song charges forward under the direction of an drumbeat before colliding with an unseen boundary, leaving you wiping the sweat from your brow in the brief interval before the next track begins.

Sleater-Kinney has never been as crafty as on this album. By adding beautiful harmonies to harsh melodies, the band comes across like a crowbar covered in silk: it may be prettier, but it still packs a punch. (Kill Rock Stars)

—Rick Cortazar

Back to A&E...