Raise your hands

...if you guessed last night's "secret" artist.

NP: Sleater-Kinney--"The Woods"
and it's still in the CD player, revealing something new with each listen. I feel almost embarassed by flinging out the superlatives, but this band draws a line in the sand and effortlessly crosses it, leaving just about everyone else slack-jawed. Much has been made about the great sheets of noise throughout the album; there's plenty of it, and I couldn't be happier, like some unholy matrimony of Sonic Youth and Hole (in fact the Guardian review of one of their recent concerts is right on my money). The best song on their last album, "One Beat", was "Light Rail Coyote", a song about an animal loose in the subway system, and it sounded like it, like a broken live wire snaking on the ground. Imagine an entire CD like that. June 18th in Toronto cannot come soon enough.