The first, best and longest-lasting of the post-riot girl bands, Sleater-Kinney spent the decade recording music at its most harmoniously angular. Even now, going on four years since their break-up, they make for the 2000s easiest-to-identify band. If you couldn't recognize Corin Tucker's over-emotive voice, there was always the jutting guitar lines usually at odds with the drums (or each other), smoothed over by vocal harmonies. To take every album Sleater-Kinney recorded from 1996 to 2005 and play them back-to-back, it'd be hard to figure out where one ended and the next one began. But it would be just as hard to pick out songs that weren't essential.
Sleater-Kinney may have been a band with a niche, but it was a niche that always sounded dangerous, performed with enough skill that it always sounded fresh. The leaps between albums were always subtle, but always kept the band in fertile territory. Still, the new millennium saw their largest, still-tiny changes. Through 2000's All Hands on the Bad One, they borrowed the cocksure voice of Bikini Kill-vintage strongwomen. But on the post-September 11 One Beat, Sleater-Kinney for the first time presented their band as extremely vulnerable. ""Far Away,"" about watching the attacks on TV, and ""Sympathy,"" about the premature birth of Corrin's son, perfectly captured the hopelessness of the time. The Woods, the band's swan song, added an eye-drop-full of '60s and '70s rock licks to their traditional abrupt, often discordant, guitars. If it was more of the same, it was always more of the same brilliance. It's hard to imagine they could have gotten more by trying to mine new grounds.
