When we celebrate Pink Floyd, we’re envisioning the years where Roger Waters and Syd Barrett made plush, trippy music about mental breakdowns, not the too-neat, conspicuously well-named, post-Rog ’80s nadir A Momentary Lapse of Reason; we don’t speak of Squeeze, the Velvet Underground album Doug Yule wrote after Lou Reed and John Cale left, the way we salute the proto-punk excellence of White Light/White Heat.
The punk-rock veterans in Washington’s Sleater-Kinney met in a chance encounter during the early ’90s at a show featuring Corin Tucker’s Heavens to Betsy — a duo whose 1994 album Calculated is a touchstone of riot grrrl, an important feminist rejoinder to the ’90s punk boys’ club that saw stars like Tucker and Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna elevating women’s issues in punk rock, leaving behind seminal records like Bikini Kill’s 1993 album Pussywhipped — and attended by Carrie Brownstein, then a member of her own band, Excuse 17.
“Sometimes it seemed like the reaction to The Center Won’t Hold was more about us refusing to conform to a codified and static version of ourselves,” Brownstein told Vuture last month about the reception of The Center Won’t Hold and the intentions behind its follow-up, this month’s Path of Wellness.
Conceptually, Wellness is a commentary on surviving unusual times, born in the midst of a divisive summer in Portland, one where nightly clashes between anti-fascist protesters and the members of the Portland Police Bureau and their admirers made national news, entering the spin cycle in a contentious presidential campaign where the incumbent sought to portray metropolitan America as a source of moral decay .
Embellishments that might have jarred an album ago cradle Tucker and Brownstein’s riffs delicately; synth and organ lines creep up unexpectedly and unassumingly; the layers of keyboards in the chugging “Method” make it feel like some lost mid-’70s pub-rock nugget; “High in the Grass” and “Tomorrow’s Grave” revisit the chunky guitar riffs of 2005’s The Woods, while the title track and opener marries the clattering percussion of the last album’s first song to the cat-and-mouse guitar theatrics of the band’s early days.