FEATURE:
Turn It On
Sleater-Kinney’s Dig Me Out at Twenty-Five
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I am going to source heavily…
IN THIS PHOTO: Sleater-Kinney in Seattle in 1997
from others, as there have been some detailed and insightful articles and reviews written about Sleater-Kinney’s third studio album, Dig Me Out. Released on 8th April, 1997, it was produced by John Goodmanson and marked the debut of Janet Weiss, who would become the band's longest-serving drummer. Carrie Brownstein (guitar, vocals), Corin Tucker (vocals, guitar) and Janet Weiss (drums, percussion) were responsible for one of the greatest albums of the 1990s. Sleater-Kinney cemented their reputation and brilliance on 1996’s Call the Doctor. That album fought against gender roles, consumerism, and Indie Rock's male-dominated hierarchy. Even though Lora Macfarlane’s drumming on the album is great, the introduction of Janet Weiss unlocked something and took Sleater-Kinney’s music to new heights. The band’s 2021 album, Path of Wellness, does not feature Weiss. She left the band because she felt she was just the drummer, and not a creative equal in Sleater-Kinney. It is sad that someone so integral to the overall sound and success of the band has left. It makes the upcoming twenty-fifth anniversary of Dig Me Out bittersweet. One big reason why the album is a classic is because of Janet Weiss’ huge talent and innovation. Of course, the album is not only about Weiss. The songwriting and performance from the trio is immense throughout! At thirteen tracks running to a total of just over thirty-six minutes, Dig Me Out is focused and economic. There is definitely no filler on this hugely important album.
I want to bring in a couple of features about Dig Me Out before getting to some reviews. The A.V. Club looked at Sleater-Kinney’s third studio album on its twentieth anniversary in 2017:
“That solid base gave Tucker and Brownstein more room to play with their interlocking guitar and vocal lines. Although both continued to tune their guitars down from a standard E to C-sharp (and still do), adding Weiss to the band forever liberated Sleater-Kinney from its lack of a bass player. Weiss’ precise, pounding beats filled the void just fine, with a little added volume from producer John Goodmanson, who noted in a profile of the band, “The awesome thing about having no bass player is you can make the guitars sound as big as you want.” The result is an aggressive, yet intricate dual-guitar attack that relentlessly plows forward with punk passion and danceable hooks, without any extended solos or self-indulgent noodling—or rock ’n’ roll wankery of any kind, even when it’s reinterpreting it.
Brownstein’s sharp opening riff on “Dig Me Out” serves as a thesis statement, an urgent warning to buckle up. The rest of the song zooms by in a panic, as an increasingly desperate-sounding Tucker sings, “I’ll wear your rings, your sores,” before belting out, “Oh god, let me out / There’s nowhere else to go.” Later in the album, “Not What You Want” resembles the Shangri-Las on speed, describing a tearful breakup in the front seat of Johnny’s car with both pedals pressed to the floor.
Tucker’s lyrics combine such relationship conflicts and confusion with a politicized take on the female body, as well as the transcendent power of the music itself, which is often the only thing giving her full ownership over herself. Without her guitar, Tucker seems broken, emotionally and physically (“Work ’til I can’t give / I’m a machine,” goes the call and response on “The Drama You’ve Been Craving”). It’s an idea that becomes literal on “Heart Factory,” which starts as an extended fantasy about feelings that can be turned on and off at will, until the chorus busts down the door with a defiant cry, “I’m not just made of parts.”
That interplay was made even more poignant by the relationship Tucker and Brownstein shared off stage, which had recently ended in heartbreak. Between Call The Doctor and Dig Me Out, Brownstein and Tucker were forcibly outed in a Spin interview describing them as “ex-lovers,” a fact that neither of them had made public at the time. In her memoir, Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl, Brownstein writes of the experience, “I told my dad that Corin and I had dated but that we didn’t anymore, which was the truth. I said that I didn’t think or know if I was gay, dating Corin was just something that had happened, which at the age of 22 was also the truth.” The relationship may have been over by the time Dig Me Out was recorded in the winter of 1996, but the wound was still fresh. That’s most evident on the poignant “One More Hour,” a snapshot of the exact moment when you know that while you might always love someone, you won‘t always be with them, delivered over skittish Gang Of Four-inspired guitar, and with Brownstein offering some consolation (“I know it’s so hard for you to let it go”) to Tucker’s anguished “I needed it.”
Toward the last third of the album, Dig Me Out turns even more reflective, waking up after the party with last night’s makeup smeared on its pillow and a pang of regret. Tucker’s vibrato-laden vocals and Brownstein’s spare guitar enhance the pathos of “Buy Her Candy,” a wistful song of longing after a perfect woman, as both a romantic and an aspirational ideal. (The narrator fears she can never measure up either way.) That uncertainty swells to epic proportions on album closer “Jenny,” where Tucker laments a lost love repeating, “Didn’t we almost have it? Didn’t you want it?” as guitars swell around her like the ocean.
Dig Me Out is frustrated with the suffering that women endure, but focuses that rage into a determination to survive. It embraces joy as an act of self-love, a defiant promise to get up, brush yourself off, and keep going despite the many painful obstacles that life throws your way. It’s a sentiment best reflected on “Things You Say,” a swirl of choppy guitars and churning emotions that ends with what could serve as the album’s manifesto: “It is brave to feel,” Tucker sings. “It is brave to be alive”.
In another twentieth anniversary feature, Stereogum discuss how quickly Dig Me Out was recorded. It is amazing to consider how such a great and enduring album was recorded over such a short period of time:
“Call The Doctor, Sleater-Kinney’s previous album, had hit like a bomb, and that album came out barely a year before Dig Me Out. And yet the band still figured out ways to level the fuck up on their third album. They lost Lori McFarlane, their perfectly capable drummer, and teamed up with Janet Weiss, probably my favorite drummer on the face of the Earth. That change did amazing things for them, anchoring their low end and giving them room to play around rather than just fire straight ahead. And Tucker and Brownstein seemed to think of themselves as something more — as rock stars, or something like it. The Dig Me Out cover famously quotes the Kinks’ The Kinks Kontroversy, demanding to be taken as seriously as any foundational classic rock. “Words And Guitar” nails the elemental power of what they were doing. “I make rock and roll,” Tucker howled on “It’s Enough” — as simple and defiant a statement of intent as you could ever want.
And as they were saying all this, Sleater-Kinney were still very much an underground band. Their last album had been a critical smash, but it didn’t exactly move massive numbers. They moved up from a tiny indie label to a less tiny indie label, and they probably started playing bigger rooms, but Dig Me Out was still an album made by the skin of its teeth. They got 10 days to record Dig Me Out — luxurious compared to the four days they had to make Call The Doctor, but not compared to anything else ever. They had to stay at Brownstein’s father’s place while making it because they didn’t have money for a hotel. The studio was bone-cold, and Brownstein has written about how they had to jump around and do aerobic routines between takes just to keep themselves warm.
So it’s a minor miracle that Dig Me Out even exists, that Sleater-Kinney had the vision to go for something so elemental and huge. And it’s a miracle for more than just material reasons. Tucker and Brownstein had been a couple, and they’d broken up not long before they recorded the album. That’s the sort of thing that would’ve broken up most bands — especially in that era, coming from a riot grrrl scene where bands rarely made it past one album. Instead, Sleater-Kinney used all that stress and hurt and anger to fuel the album. Brownstein has written about disconnecting emotionally while recording it, working on her “One More Hour” guitar parts and not even thinking about whether she was the person Tucker was singing about, the one who had the darkest eyes.
Dig Me Out is Sleater-Kinney’s greatest album, the one that will always jump into people’s minds when they think of the band. It’s not my favorite Sleater-Kinney album; that’s One Beat, now and forever. Maybe it’s not your favorite Sleater-Kinney album either. But it’s the one where everything absolutely clicked, where they rode some astral wave and burned their name into the history of American underground rock. It’s where they became legends. Dig Me Out isn’t a punk album, as Call The Doctor had been — not really, not exactly. Instead, it’s an album that lies outside subgenre designations, outside conversations. It’s where Brownstein and Tucker’s guitars became these tangled and intricate balls of melody, where they began to sound like a completely interconnected web. It’s where Brownstein’s icy, haughty vocals first held their own against Tucker’s otherworldly roar. It’s where Weiss came in and gave the band a whole new rhythmic dimension — hitting hard but treating her drums as an instrument rather than just a way to keep rhythm. It’s where they really became Sleater-Kinney.
Critics lost their minds for Dig Me Out, just as they’d done for Call The Doctor before it. And in a later age, that critical love probably would’ve been enough to push Sleater-Kinney closer to something resembling popularity. These days, the power of the internet is such that critical love can be enough to push a band into bigger venues, into higher spots on the festival posters that didn’t exist in 1997. (Back then, the closest thing we had to Coachella was alt-rock radio-station festivals, and Sleater-Kinney were emphatically not getting booked at those.)”.
It is worth highlighting a couple of positive reviews. Dig Me Out found very little but huge respect and praise when it arrived in 1997. That has continued to this very day. Pitchfork wrote about the album in 2014, following the release of a vinyl box-set of all of the band’s studio albums up until that point:
“Then, behold: Janet Weiss. She joined on 1997's breakneck Dig Me Out, an all-time great American punk statement, giving Sleater-Kinney the most crucial muscle a drummer can offer: not sheer force, but heart, taking the momentum to a new plane. Sleater-Kinney released their next four records with the larger Olympia feminist label, Kill Rock Stars, but none distilled the band's sound and attitude like Dig Me Out: sometimes brutal heartache, sometimes a menacing threat, always intelligent and extreme, there are enough hooks architected into these two- and three-minute songs to span several albums, but even the added dum-de-dum sugar seems as though it must be raw Portland agave.
"Little Babies" critiques stereotypes of motherhood, "Heart Factory" roars over synthetic emotions of the Prozac Nation, and the instantly classic "Words and Guitar" is an ode to rock that just feels necessary. At the peak of "The Drama You've Been Craving"—Tucker's "Kick it OUT!"—there are practically fireworks bursting on either side. Really, Dig goes from 0-to-100 within seconds of its opening salvo of a title track, which begs for transcendence from worldly oppression, "Outta this mess/ Outta my head."
Unlike so much in the trajectory of punk, there is no nihilistic self-destruction in the face of chaos. More than skepticism, anti-consumerism, or the glories of tattoo art, punk teaches empathy, a principle Sleater-Kinney practiced with nuance. This is why Sleater-Kinney's music shines a light despite its loudness, why it is easy to be alone with the songs and feel protected. Sleater-Kinney would never forego the optimism to believe their songbook could make us smarter, angrier, more tender and hopeful. Dig Me Out dreams of a better future, clawing itself up with every note.
The highlight of Dig Me Out and Sleater-Kinney's career, "One More Hour" is one of the most devastating break-up songs in rock. "Oh, you've got the darkest eyes," Tucker and Brownstein quaver in unison—the song is about their own short-lived romance—and the way Tucker extends the last word, it is like she can't let them go. There are complex feelings near clear ones, which is what break-ups are: someone wants to untangle the mess, someone wants to snip it apart. "I needed it," Tucker howls, hardly distinguishing where one word ends and another begins. "One More Hour" is sublime sadness, a kind one can only know when staring at the end of something and wanting desperately for it not to be so”.
I will end with SPIN’s take on the mesmeric and staggering Dig Me Out. This is what they had to say when they explored the album on its twentieth anniversary:
“Nobody wants to be radical anymore. On the right, radicals blow up family-planning clinics; on the left, they’re shaggy ’60s relics and fat, hairy manhaters who destroyed feminism for ordinary women. Even as slang, “radical” seems about as fresh as Pauly Shore in a pair of Bongo shorts.
Until you hear Sleater-Kinney. “Dig me out!” hollers Corin Tucker on the title track of the band’s new album. “Dig me in! / Outta this mess, baby / Outta my head.” Tucker’s singing about how rock’s monstrous noise rips off her skin, leaving her unprotected and gloriously unbound. As guitarist Carrie Brownstein turbocharges a riff rescued from Iggy Pop and David Bowie’s “China Girl” and drummer Janet Weiss applies dominatrix discipline to her kick drum, Tucker alternately guides the music’s onslaught and gives in to it. She lets the songs’ electric momentum strip her down to her emotional core—a pure and antisocial humanity. From start to finish, Dig Me Out aims for this place of undiluted emotion, where girlishness yields to the rage and joy of women who feel no need to charm.
Nurtured in the pink petri dish of Olympia, Washington, where women’s lib never went out of fashion and punk meant the gentle triumph of nerdy kids, Sleater-Kinney seemed at first like a glorious anomaly: politically radical artists whose rhetoric fired them up instead of weighing them down. Tucker’s voice was one of those wonders of the world that turned listeners into pilgrims; Brownstein drove her own path with raggedy-ass, blade-sharp guitar, and the songs gleamed with quick eloquence. Yet for all the harsh allure of their 1995 debut and last year’s Call the Doctor, Sleater-Kinney’s music remained, for the most part, more no than yes, a reaction against sexism instead of an attempt to imagine life beyond it.
On Dig Me Out, a rockin’ little collection of love songs and catchy dance numbers, Sleater-Kinney take the next step. Like the most radical feminist art, the album cuts into the meat of women’s everyday experience, aiming for depths untouched by the buttons-and-brows (or nose-and-belly-button-ring) conventions that identify what’s “feminine.” This is not an easy task in the pop world, where most female artists trade in these conventions, occasionally sassing back, but ultimately staying within familiar boundaries. Many women assume they’re liberated because they can choose which fantasty to modify. But self-determination doesn’t mean shit when you didn’t create the self you’re determining. And one thing rock ‘n’ roll’s beat can offer is a momentary sandblast that frees raw consciousness. When Tucker sings “I’ll touch the sky and say what I want,” she knows that the music is what opens her mouth.
It takes chops to achieve such a visceral liberation, and Sleater-Kinney now own them fully. Weiss, who joined the group last year, is both relentless and highly musical, and Brownstein has grown dexterous on guitar; her twisted melodicism, which always got its energy from wiry riffs instead of crunchy chords, is a full partner to Tucker’s vocal aerobatics. Sleater-Kinney now deliver the punch their words describe. “Words and Guitar” leaps and skitters with the just-released repression of early Talking Heads; “Dance Song ’97” uses a Farfisa for a new wave, Day-Glo mood. Even “Little Babies,” a fairly standard feminist protest against the maternity trap, gets an added bite from a rock-reveling chorus (“All the little babies go one-two-three-four!”). Over chords that sounds like the Clash taking a walk on the wild side, Tucker and Brownstein giddily admit their own need to suck the mother’s milk of the backbeat.
It’s a blast to get charged up by Sleater-Kinney’s suffragette rock, but Tucker and Brownstein make their most surprisingly radical moves within love songs. Most address women, and this unqualified declaration of lesbian desire immediately lifts them past typical wedding-bell romance. Both fragmentary and painfully intimate, the songs avoid erotic platitudes, instead exploring sexual longing in plain language. Tucker and Brownstein are listening to themselves, and what they discover isn’t simple. In the magnificent “One More Hour,” the chorus counterposes Tucker’s irrational heartbreak (“I needed it,” she repeats, her pitch rising) against Brownstein’s rote rationalizations and deadpan clichés. The argument ebbs and fades; it could be lovers feuding, or one friend consoling the other, or the bereft Tucker split against herself. In this moment what emerges is the clarity of partial vision, the understanding that who you are is a process, not reducible to parts.
Dig Me Out captures the noise of a soul-filled body shaking itself awake, and that’s an experience that bridges any gender divide. In it, guys as well as girls will hear the rattle of their brains and the flash of their libidos. The catharsis Sleater-Kinney seek is more than just fun; it’s a battle in earnest for the human right to know and possess yourself. Feminism was supposed to be about that fight, too, but it’s still sputtering under the weight of its own complacency. Sleater-Kinney push us back into the fray. If they wanna be our Simone de Beauvior, Dig Me Out proves they’re up to it”.
Ahead of its twenty-fifth anniversary on 8th April, I wanted to write about a wonderful album that is one of the defining statements of the 1990s. During a decade that saw so many scenes, genius releases and timeless albums, Dig Me Out ranks there with the best of them! If you have not heard the album in a while, make sure that you dig it out, turn it on and…
PLAY it loud.