sleater-kinney the hot rock poll

burn dont freeze
memorize

1 song for you
god is a #

get up
banned

size of our love
qtr to 3
...
the rest idk

any of the top-4 i could reasonably vote for imo, good album

"Get Up" but the "Start Together" through "Banned..." sequence is often my favorite in their catalog. And "The Size of Our Love" and "A Quarter to Three" kill me.

is it weird that this is by far my favorite album by them? "God Is A Number" is my shit.

start together is one of my all time favourite openers, get up and 1/4 to 3 big big songs for the younger me... i think start together takes it this time

"get up" or gtfo

is it weird that this is by far my favorite album by them?

Same here. I'm torn between the first and last tracks.

i loved this album when it came out but find it kind of patchy now. voted "get up"

This is my very close #2 album by them, only a hair behind All Hands. (And some days they switch places.)

I feel like voting for "The End of You" today.

I could lose "Don't Talk Like" and "Living in Exile."

oh "Living In Exile" is prob my 2nd favorite!

going with the standard vote: "get up" and yes it's their best album

anyone catch'em on this tour?

absolutely. NEVER missed a chance to see them. saw 'em @ the Fillmore and then later grrreat american music hall that year. they were my favorite current band in the world at that point

so between this and the AHOTBO poll - not having listened to these albums in years after a period of loving both there are tracks here where i can't remember a single thing about them ("living in exile", "one song for you")

not that it matters since either way i'm gonna vote "get up"

first S-K song i ever heard too

I'm genuinely afraid I might have a full emotional breakdown if I ever hear "The Size of Our Love" again - what a devastating song.

first S-K song i ever heard too

can't imagine getting into them from this album then finding out about call the doctor. that'd be fun i think

that was me!

Call The Doctor was the first one I bought (read about it in CMJ). Was a die hard fan by the time of Dig Me Out.

I actually copied to THR to cassette in the winter of 2000 and it became a car staple, way after AHOTBO. Despite being blown away by DMO I just missed THR first time 'round.

xp Same here as Johnny Fever, I saw a thing about them in Rolling Stone and ordered the self-titled 10" and "Call the Doctor" right after.

I think I want to vote "A Quarter to Three," but I need to listen to this again.

it seems to occupy a weird space in their career -- after they were the exciting new thing but before they seemed like a reliable career band, different from the earlier stuff but not so much that it became really divisive

it's definitely a transition album; before it they were a punk band and after it they were a "rock band"; hot rock seems less identity-focused, sadder

wow big dip in P&J rank too:

Call The Doctor: #3
Dig Me Out: #4
The Hot Rock: #23
All Hands: #10
One Beat: #5
The Woods: #4

They were starting to position themselves as a Rock Band too ("Banned...").

yeah i'm sure i've said this elsewhere but i feel like some of their most affecting, experimental, vulnerable stuff is here, but also the beginning of their smug getting-four-stars-either-way rawk shit

wow big dip in P&J rank too

tbf wasn't either all hands or one beat or the woods pretty blah and definitely not deserving of any of those ranks, seems like a bad poll to judge them by

well, the ranks are determined by the number of ballots on which an album appears.

oh i'm not judging them by anything -- i'm just saying it's interesting that the only time their bulletproof critical rep let up was on an album that everyone seems to agree now is very good

I don't remember disappointment but I do remember confusion when THR was released. It's a crowded album – Corin and Carrie singing around and on top of each other, the guitars doing the same. Cumulatively it takes a few listens to make an impact whereas the first three were straight-up bangers.

AHOTBO on the other hand was "wtf are they doing on some of these songs"

yeah something had to be going on for Mary J. Blige and Basement Jaxx to outrank Sleater-Kinney on Pazz & Jop

Burn Don't Freeze stands out by a country mile

hot rock to me seemed a bit like a late night listen album as opposed to the mostly all out assault of the first few

I don't remember disappointment but I do remember confusion when THR was released. It's a crowded album – Corin and Carrie singing around and on top of each other, the guitars doing the same.

But this is exactly what makes the band, for me - but I came back to this one having discovered them through "You're No Rock N Roll Fun." Loved how loopy and interactive the guitar and vocals parts seemed, this very precise darting in and out that maintained a very "live" and non-mechanical feel. I still think this is my favorite record of theirs even if I know fewer of the songs by name, it's more of a textural thing. Will have to listen to it again.. off the top of my head it's "Burn Don't Freeze" or "The Size of Our Love" but....

GET UP

'the end of you'. the odysseus stuff is epic and awesome. the band-fan stuff i guess i hardly even remember is there.

this record always seemed to me really cerebral without not being spirited and barbaric-yawpy like their earlier records. but not terror-inducing like those.

torn between 'get up' which is basically SK's greatest song (certainly their best lyric) and 'burn don't freeze' which was the first one i loved, that weird tangle of vocals darting in and out was like nothing i'd ever heard back in 2000.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Start Together is my favorite SK song by a pretty wide margin for reasons I'm not good enough at things to articulate. I guess I just like that it gets in there and does its thing with no riot grrl or "Dave Fridmann produced this" baggage. Great vocal by Corin, and the bit from 1:20 to 1:35 where Carrie riffs with increasingly nervous energy as Corin gets ready to crash into "baby don't you leave me" is just one of my favorite things in rock.

Also, "A Quarter To Three" is very evocative and underrated. Very sleepy, ghostly production, and it doesn't sound quite like anything else they recorded.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

this was the first s-k album I heard and it's probably my favorite, even though it feels incongruous with what came before and after (and I LOVE s-k in their "typical" form). guitar/vocal interplay sounded so odd and fascinating on the initial listen! nearly any track could've won this poll and I'd have been okay with it.

this one's hitting the spot lately. band is a ferocious unit, but i can't get over how damn creative is Janet Weiss. i can't pick one

i think i've listened to this more consistently than any other SK record. probably the essential record because its so cuspy. my fav tracks on later albums, with a few exceptions, are probably the ones that remind me most of their sound on this record.

Netflix says I'm getting my copy of The Hot Rock on Friday :/

^^Good flick.

Burn, Don't Freeze is such an awesome song, catchy and conceptually successful - I liked this graf about it in SPIN's recent ranking of every S-K song:

If there are still skeptics who deny that Tucker and Brownstein belong in the pantheon of rock’s all-time great double acts, well, they probably haven’t heard “Burn, Don’t Freeze.” Concerned with snuffing out a destructive relationship, the song pits the two singer-guitarists against each other as they unspool different perspectives on a torched romance, all while a careening guitar line slides back and forth. The pair’s vocal interplay mimics a telepathic connection gone awry, when lovers who once finished sentences together have long stopped listening. It’s rare for disharmony to sound so harmonious.

Never was a big S-K fan before, but I've been listening to this album a lot lately.

"The Size of Our Love" is a Song For Our Times.

I ain't gonna listen to you no more!

i think i voted for "get up" in this poll but i just listened to this album on the way home from work and "burn, don't freeze" is undeniable.

I ain't gonna listen to you no more!

― kinder, Thursday, April 30, 2020 4:54 AM (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

25 Today!

great February feeling album this actually. cold sunlight kind of thing