Corin Tucker Band

http://krs5rc.com/krs/bands/corintuckerband/audio/Doubt.mp3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwU7idFy2Ro

Corin Tucker Graduates From Riot Grrrl To Riot Woman
By Matt Ashare

It’s so very tempting to read between the lines of 1,000 years, the emotionally turbulent and often devastatingly poignant Kill Rock Stars debut by the newly minted Corin Tucker Band. Tucker, an early convert to the riot grrrl cause, got her start in the Olympia punk band Heavens To Betsy twenty years ago. But she really came into her own co-fronting the grrrl-powered trio Sleater-Kinney with fellow singer/guitarist Carrie Brownstein, a perfect rock-and-roll pairing that sadly dissolved when the band went on hiatus in 2006 after seven albums in eleven years. So when, for example, she opens the disc’s haunted yet insistent title track with the hyperbolic “About 1,000 years ago, you left/I felt nothing for centuries” and follows up with a chorus that begins “And when it hit that you were gone/I stood frozen for so long,” it’s hard not to assume she’s got Brownstein in mind — especially since she ends the last verse with the defiant “With each song I get closer/With each note I return.” Then again, back in October she told the Village Voice she’d written “1,000 Years” for possible inclusion in the film Twilight: New Moon.
    1,000 Years is peppered with could-be snippets of autobiography. In “Half A World Away,” against a slinky guitar riff that rises to a pleasing roar, Tucker sings with forlorn dignity about an absent partner who’s making a “film” while “the phone in the hotel room never rings.” In fact, she’s been married to filmmaker Lance Bangs since 2000. And is “Break up with the boogie/Break up with the beat/Did you let us down, or was it me” a reference to lingering doubts about her decision to move on from Sleater-Kinney? It is a line from the disc’s most overtly Sleater-Kinneyish track, the pounding rocker “Doubt,” with Tucker’s gorgeous ambulance siren of a voice reaching an anguished peak on every noisy, discordant chorus.
    It’s the gift of great songwriters — and storytellers — to exploit real-life experiences. But that’s only part of what gives 1,000 Years its emotional power and weight. Tucker has emerged from the shadow of her former band with 11 tightly knit, poetic vignettes that conflate the vividly real with the equally vivid imagined. The timely “Thrift Store Coats,” one of the disc’s most affecting tunes, captures the desperation of a family on the brink of financial ruin without falling prey to the all too common desire to find something ennobling in poverty and hardship. “If this is a test/Can we make it through?,” she asks without answering, as the gentle caress of piano makes way for the pleasant bite of growling guitars. I’d be lying if I said Brownstein’s sinewy guitar and vocal counterpoints are missed. But with 1,000 Years, Tucker has expanded her musical vistas, with strings and keyboards laced throughout, and sharpened her lyrical vision in ways that will surely come in handy when Sleater-Kinney (hopefully) reunite.