Friday, June 7th, 2019

Sleater-Kinney – Hurry On Home

Sleater-Kinney get massively educated…


[Video]
[6.25]

Isabel Cole: I love that I mishear the line as “disconnect me from my bones / so I can flirt“; it feels right for a song about all that violence of desire shit I’m so into, a song which swirls with the charybdic hunger to be consumed, the unreconstructed self-loathing which gives urgency to our quest for the interior wholeness we misname love. The brutal wisdom in the switch from dress downable/uptownable/hair grab-able/grandslam-able to unfuckable/unlovable/unlistenable/unwatchable, the ways we learn to pretty ourselves up as an apology for our own repulsiveness. Those wailing harmonies like some myth about the dangers of an ugly woman, the distorted wordless vocal jittering in the back of the chorus somewhere between playful and vicious, the way the guitar near the end crackles to life like a house catching flame. All this, and it has the audacity to sound fun!
[9]

Alfred Soto: Don’t surrender to the temptation about who does what: Sleater-Kinney or St. Vincent could have written “You disconnect me from my bones/So I can float” in 2002 or 1995. Plenty of S-K tracks boasted synth coatings too. The thickness of the riffs and the howled manipulated vocals keep this from going pop, although maybe the band thought the rhythm licks in the coda were a nice try. 
[7]

Ryo Miyauchi: Sleater-Kinney’s once jagged, coiled guitars aim straight for their prey in big, bold print, just like the expression of their appetite: the unfuckable/unlovable/unlistenable/unwatchable sequence gets across their very lack of inhibition without contention, but it’s the visceral phrase of “disconnect me from my bones” that really sinks its teeth. That said, I prefer this band as well as the hunger they sing about at its messiest: it shouldn’t be easy to place such cravings into words as a string of clean iPhone texts, and I’d like the rock music to be as scrambled and knotty as those cravings can be.
[5]

Ian Mathers: Is it fair that how we think of artists who’ve made great work can be tainted by their insistence on producing less than great work? No. But it is true (even with bands where I like the less-than great work a lot more than this). If only they’d stopped after One Beat, they coulda been all-timers.
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: One of my favorite singles of 2012 was Rebekka Karijord’s “Use My Body While It’s Still Young,” but I liked it a bit less when I realized the chorus didn’t actually go “separate the life from my bones,” but “celebrate,” when the former would suit the death-drive tempo far more. “Hurry On Home,” with a chorus built around a similar line, a similar frantic emotional clench, and a bordering-on-operatic bridge, is the song that could have been, even if it’s yet another example of a kinda-synth pivot from a 2010s rock band.
[7]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: There are some lines here that I can’t quite parse but that’s not really the point– “Hurry On Home” works on a more elemental level, with St. Vincent’s production assist warping the vivid realism that Sleater-Kinney operate in into a funhouse mirror, making the song’s point more compellingly than any particular lyrical touch.
[7]

Taylor Alatorre: Back in 2012 when the band Pussy Riot was regularly making headlines, I had no idea what they actually sounded like, but this comes pretty close to what I was imagining. It’s punk rock as museum performance art, having gone through layers of abstraction and formalization to arrive at something that carries more weight symbolically than it does musically.  I’m in no place to demand that Sleater-Kinney return to the looser, yet still politically pointed stylings of songs like “You’re No Rock N Roll Fun” — that’s not where they are right now, and that’s fine. But even on No Cities to Love they seemed to be rebelling against the burdens of representation and indie stardom; here it sounds like they’re submitting to them.
[5]

Iris Xie: “Hurry on Home” is acidic, hard, crunchy, and pumped through with cortisol from the stress of living underneath the patriarchy, with all the ravages of desire and self-deprecation. I like the gleeful guitar riffs with the most visceral verse that starts with “Disconnect me from my bones,” because it rides those sentiments with a free easiness that acknowledges how often women and femme folks are used to dislocating and emptying out themselves to serve the needs of their partners. The tortured vocal stylings also reminds me of the aggressively maudlin songs by of Montreal and all of their funky misery. But really, underneath the constraints of society, women are often punished and discouraged for being direct and not self-effacing. In defiance, Sleater-Kinney is unapologetic about their lack of subtlety, to the point of the production lining up and boosting the rawness of the lyrics without any filters. For me, I am rather frustrated at my own socialization and the strain of undoing these behaviors, and would not choose to listen to “Hurry on Home” in my free time because I need a break from feeling these emotions. But, it is comforting to know that if I ever need the validation of my frustration, that Sleater-Kinney made this song as a straightforward sonic description of this interiority. It’s all such bullshit, but you have to continue living and navigating the best you can anyway — I know I have to.
[6]

Reader average: [7.6] (5 votes)

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