Sleater-Kinney‘s self-titled debut laid down a solid foundation for the Pacific Northwest trio’s artful yet furious punk. Their second album Call the Doctor only expanded the possibilities of their music, incorporating darker textures and greater nuances between impassioned yelps of desire to be someone’s very own personal Joey Ramone. But they didn’t achieve perfection until their third album, Dig Me Out, a 13-track rollercoaster of two-guitar, no-bass punk rock. The band’s first album with new drummer Janet Weiss, Dig Me Out almost sounds like the work of a completely different band—and in all fairness, it is 33 percent of a new band. It’s crisper, punchier, more streamlined, yet still fierce and with some of the most urgent, rhythmically taut drumming on an album of its kind. Thus would begin one of the most rock solid lineups in rock ‘n’ roll for the next nine years.
While Sleater-Kinney’s roots may have been in the riot grrrl movement in the Pacific Northwest, the band took a different stylistic tack than the raw punk of Bikini Kill or the grunge of L7. For a slight hint of what one’s getting into on Dig Me Out, just look a little bit beyond the guitar on the album’s cover (which pays homage to The Kinks’ Kink Kontroversy) to find the LP sleeve of Black Sabbath’s Vol. 4 pinned up on the wall. Sleater-Kinney aren’t metal, but having emerged from a D.I.Y. punk scene and with an ear for the heavy rock canon, Sleater-Kinney created a brand new sound all their own, one that steps outside any comfortable D.I.Y. constraints in favor of something bigger.
The group plays their most confrontational cards up front with the title track, guitars blazing and drums rumbling beneath Corin Tucker’s raw lyrics like “do you get nervous watching me bleed?” Yet “One More Hour” shows a more tender side of the band, written by Tucker about her prior relationship with guitarist Carrie Brownstein, as she revealed in a somewhat awkward interview several years later. This balance of the personal and the political is another component that sets Sleater-Kinney apart, with feminism and personal politics coming to fuse into one brutally honest package that could only be paired with their aggressive but fun brand of indie punk. From: https://www.treblezine.com/sleater-kinney-dig-me-out-review/
