Review: Reunited Sleater-Kinney at Union Transfer

Desperately loved bands break up and get back together all the time. What's rare is when they come back at full strength, returning not only with skills intact and wisdom gained, but also the sense of urgency that made them so desperately loved in the first place.

Such is the case with Sleater-Kinney, the gloriously alive three piece rock and roll band of singer-guitarists Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein and drummer Janet Weiss who played a bristling-with-energy show at Union Transfer on Saturday night. The band originally named for a road north of Olympia, Washington where they rehearsed in the mid-1990s - Sleater rhymes with "greater" - are back on the road after going separate ways following their 2005 album, The Woods.

All three women pursued rewarding projects in the interim. Tucker recorded two albums with an eponymous band while raising a family, Weiss played in indie pop duo Quasi, as well as with Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks and Wild Flag. And Brownstein was one of the principals in that band, while also going on to comedic glory with Fred Armisen in the satirical cable series Portlandia.

But the dynamic new No Cities To Love - so far, the best album of 2015 - clearly demonstrates that there's no real substitute for the alchemy the trio achieves in each other's company. That was made even abundantly clear onstage at Union Transfer, which had sold out instantly following the band's surprise reunion announcement in October.

Kicking off with "Price Tag," the working class heroine salvo that's the lead track on No Cities, the elements that distinguish the band were immediately on display.

Weiss' rugged, rumbling drumming more than compensates for the absence of bass player in the band. (Touring member Katie Harkin of British band Sky Larkin joined the trio on guitar and keyboards on some tracks.) Brownstein's arsenal of inventive, rocked out riffs drive the songs forward while her spoken-sung vocals overlap with Tucker's in a musical back-and-forth that plays like an interior conversation of one restless mind.

And Tucker's four alarm clarion call voice alerted the room that packed with more dudes than you might expect to see at a feminist rock trio reunion show that this is a band expert at making every heightened moment fraught with meaning. "We never really checked, we never checked the price tag," she sang. "When the cost comes in, it's gonna be high."

The 23 song, highly efficient hour and a half set gathered momentum as it moved briskly along, including all but one of 10 tracks on No Cities. Only the quietest track, "Fade" was omitted. And though in their first decade, Sleater-Kinney were known for performing classic-rock covers, this time the heritage they explored was their own in all all-original set. Digging into a rich back catalog, they pulled the shimmy shake of "Oh!" hard edged crunch of "Light Rail Coyote" and slowly building "Sympathy" off of 2002's One Beat.

But as captivating as the old songs were - like the cutely catchy "Little Babies" from 1997's Dig Me Out or the Brownstein- sung lullaby "Modern Girl" from The Woods, both part of an encore that also included a shout-out to Planned Parenthood - what makes the Sleater-Kinney reunion special is the new ones.

That was best exemplified by "Surface Envy" the let's-get-back-to-work battle cry from No Cities, with which the group really found its gear on Saturday, five songs in. "We win, we lose, only together do we break the rules," Tucker sang at the top of her voice, over a martial beat.

It's one of the better songs about being in a band that you're likely to hear, and to the crowd's delight it announced Sleater-Kinney's intention to stick around for a while. Directing her words at both her bandmates and their audience, Tucker declaimed: "I feel so much stronger, now that you're here / We've got so much to do, let me make that clear."

Previously: Introducing The Dan and Dan Music Podcast Follow In The Mix on Twitter here