At what age does your feminist anger stop being qualified as "riot grrrl rage"? Kill My Blues, the Corin Tucker Band's sophomore album, is being heralded as the former Sleater-Kinney bandleader's default to her '91 Olympia factory settings. This is a fantastic prospect surely stoking our 1990s nostalgia and wiping the weird taste of her previous album off our palates, but it doesn't quite hold.
Tucker is now a grown-azz, 39-year-old woman, and on Kill My Blues she tackles topics that weren't on her riot girl radar at 20: mortality, the joy of conception, how she could use a vacation. She is singing from the perspective of her life as the mother of two kids who's maybe a little wistful for days when her life was a little more carefree and Joey Ramone was still above ground. Her rage is no more than that of any American who's paying attention in 2012.
It's only natural that we'd want Tucker to stay put in her Revolution Girl Style, Now! pose. Who wants our rock stars to get old? To change? Rock'n'roll is the province of the young. Therein lies the discomfort of our icons' maturing and making records that reflect their evolving ken. Fandom would be so much tidier if they could keep neatly fitting the nostalgic niche we hold for them in our hearts. ("My old life is dead," sings Tucker, joyful on "Blood Bones and Sand", her song about the maternal tether.) Tucker is at the fore of the generation of post-grunge boom indie rockers, punks who were close enough to glean the sad lessons of heroin and major label deals from a safe distance, and subsequently they are still alive and fortified by the same communities that fostered them making music in the first place; it might be a while before we see any of these folks "age out" of the DIY scene.
And so there we are with Kill My Blues, on the heels of Tucker's solo debut, 1,000 Years, a record the sounded better on paper than in real life (it turned out Tucker's Joni-phase produced her Hejira rather than her Blue). On tour, Tucker saw how drumless balladry wasn't energizing her fans that live and love for her scream and guitar sheroics-- and so begat this return to form.
The good news is the Corin Tucker of Kill My Blues is not the Corin of Heavens to Betsy, nor is she the same woman we knew from that year when Dig Me Out forever blared from the stereo. The range of her voice is more expansive, and there is an absolute control here that she's never had before; when she goes full-throttle, the effect is stunning. Perhaps she's outgrown some Olympia-born punk shame about being a full-fledged rock singer; no longer aiming for raw and ragged and instead giving us the full Benetar. It's Tucker's voice that gives Kill My Blues its thrills.
On album opener "Groundhog Day", Tucker sings of coming to after years busy with raising her young family, amid the GOP's War on Women, confronting the same battles for women's lives and bodies that riled her two decades ago. She points the rhetorical finger at herself, asking, "Did I fall asleep/ On the backs of the women that come before me?" Musically, it's the closest thing to a Sleater-Kinney moment on the record, spirited and gnashing. Tucker's band are formidable old hands all-- onetime Unwound drummer Sara Lund, one of the underground's great distinctive players and Seth Lorinczi of Circus Lupus (if you are old) and Golden Bears (if you aren't) and Mike Clark, the spare guy in the Jicks-- they give the pensive album some thrust. The strange part is that Tucker still plays as if Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss were at her side; there is a space around her that feels like it needs to be filled, her antic rhythm and tempo don't always settle with Lund's in-the-pocket playing.
The album starts strong, but is uneven, dragging toward the end. The high points are the "Teen Spirit"-bite and twinkling keys of "Constance", and Tucker's blistering tribute to Natalie Cox, "I Don't Wanna Go". The album's best moment-- the bridge and solo flourish on "Joey"-- happens two minutes into a song that otherwise goes nowhere. The cutesy "Summer Jams" feels long at four minutes and Tucker employs a string of clichés that are below her faculties. The album is self-produced and at times it seems they could have benefitted from some outside ears to help tighten things up. Tucker is unquestionably at the height of her power as a vocalist, but there are times where even that can't buoy Kill My Blues.
