Sleater-Kinney performs at The Riviera Theatre in Chicago on Oct. 19, 2019
By Nina Tadic
“The Flannel and the Fury” is a fantastic name for a tour – especially a tour comprised of powerful women in alternative music.
On a Thursday night in Chicago, crowds decked out in (you guessed it) worn-in flannel, ripped jeans, Docs, and checkered Vans lined the sidewalks outside of the legendary Salt Shed, mingling and buzzing with excitement over the night’s festivities. At the Shed’s Fairgrounds, droves of fans spread out across the Fairgrounds pavement – some at picnic tables with a beer in hand, others scoping out merch booths or grabbing a slice of pizza, everyone in congregation to see three incredible acts.
Opening the night is Frankie Cosmos, performing as a duet led by Greta Kline, and closing it out is 2000s girl-anthem legend and co-headliner Liz Phair.. and preceding her, right in the middle, is Phair’s fellow coheadliners – Sleater-Kinney.
Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker’s Pacific Northwestern indie punk band is one of legend in the alternative scene – they’re one of the ones that has made it so far. Their music has spanned three decades, their careers have branched out far and wide, and their performances are absolutely insane.
From the second these ladies take the stage just shy of twilight, the crowd is absolutely giddy. Quite a few audible “oh my god”s and “it’s TIME”s are heard from those on the barricade, and grins from ear to ear flash across folks faces as Brownstein, Tucker, and their supporting band grab their instruments and get into it.
“Hell” is the perfect introduction to the set – starting out slow and soft, a stripped down, lyrical ballad, the song pulls the audience in. Especially when they hear the croon of Tucker’s “Hell don’t have no worries / Hell don’t have no past,” at which point she’s a siren entrancing her listeners. Once the song picks up, though? It is a rioting anthem with Tucker belting out lyrics, she and Brownstein both playing so forcefully and vibrantly under the flood of red and white lights that every person in a three mile radius must take notice.
During “Needlessly Wild” and “Start Together” the two are all over the stage as they shred on their guitars, moving together and apart like magnets, and the crowd is absolutely ballistic about it. The best part of Sleater-Kinney is debatable – it could be their sound, their energy, their volume, their charisma – but at the Salt Shed, it might well be all of these things combined with what they choose to say between songs.
“We’re a loud band. I know we’re loud, I know there are people up front saying ‘F—, they’re loud,” just waiting for Liz Phair to get up here. And I used to apologize for being loud, but I don’t care anymore. We’re loud. We’re going to be loud. I think that with the world we currently live in, we need to be loud. Also, Free Palestine.” echoes through every speaker on the grounds, and the amount of hooting, hollering, and immense cheering from the crowd is phenomenal.
This commentary comes just a few days following the polarizing and very political “a-political” move of Ed Sheeran to remove hip hop artist Macklemore as the opener for his current tour following Macklemore’s choice to advocate for Palestine onstage.
Following the aforementioned debacle, many artists have gone out of their way to do the opposite of Sheeran and follow in Macklemore’s stead, using their platform for exactly that – advocating in favor of freeing Palestine and stopping the genocide. It only makes sense that at an alternative punk show made up entirely of women that this sentiment would be echoed and met with an audience of similar values that is also quite excited to share this conviction.
Their set continues on, and it is vivacious, energetic, and flows like water. Sixteen solid songs: a good mix of almost every album they’ve released over the past twenty years. Fans lose their minds during every song, but especially go wild in the final quarter of the set. It seems that “Dig Me Out” into “Modern Girl” into “Untidy Creature” into “Entertain” is the perfect fan-service cocktail that implies “we appreciate you for appreciating our art – and we appreciate our art, too.”
Sleater-Kinney is a fantastic act, and worth catching every time.
(Review by Nina Tadic)