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.
The Killers are apparently Mitt Romney’s favourite contemporary rock band, or at least the only one it is safe for the presidential candidate to mention. Like Conservative politicians in Britain, Republicans are at a disadvantage when it comes to advertising their music taste, at risk of being denounced by alternative bands unwilling to be associated with right-wing ideologies. The Killers, however, have proved unusually gracious.
