Call the Doctor

Gave away my copy 10 years ago. Finally replaced it. Best album by Sleater-Kinney and one of the best "Riot Grrl" recordings as well.

Excellent album! One of my all-time favorites.

Arrived very fast at my friend's house and she was thrilled with it. Great music from a group she loves. Super transaction, thanks!

remaster sounds amazing on this classic LP

Love this album!

I mainly bought this album so I could have a copy of "I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone" and I definitely got that. This is not (in my opinion) the BEST Sleater-Kinney album (that would be All Hands On The Bad One), but it's worth a listen.

Never gets old!

Sleater-Kinney is a band I can only talk about using superlatives. Easily the best all-female band in the history of rock. In my opinion the best rock band of the past decade based on actual output (I defy anyone to name a band that has produced six albums as great as Sleater-Kinney has in the past ten years; Belle and Sebastian can come close, but too much of their work of the past five years has been uneven). They were originally viewed as the best of the second wave of riot grrrl bands, but I think that has obscured just how extraordinary this band is. Our society tends to marginalize too many women artists and performers by relegating them to "Female" status, much as I did in the second sentence of this review. Mind you, they are the greatest female rock band ever, but there is a sense in which that helps obscure just how great they are. Radiohead is a great band, but their output from 1996 to the present is not nearly as impressive as Sleater-Kinney's.CALL THE DOCTOR is my favorite Sleater-Kinney album, but that isn't to say anything bad about the five albums that came after. Employing the Pitchforkmedia rating system, I would give around a 9.4 to CALL THE DOCTOR, and between 8.0 and 9.2 to the next five (which is actually pretty close to what Pitchfork gives them, which, again, no other band I know can match). Other people will prefer ONE BEAT or THE WOODS or DIG ME OUT, but I just like the hooks of CALL THE DOCTOR a bit more than the others. But I truly do consider all six of their post-debut albums--CALL THE DOCTOR (1996), DIG ME OUT (1997), THE HOT ROCK (1999), ALL HANDS ON THE BAD ONE (2000), ONE BEAT (2002), and THE WOODS (2005)--to be absolutely essential. In my opinion, based on this output, Sleater-Kinney has to be accounted not merely the best band of the past decade, but one of the finest bands ever.Their eponymous debut album was good, but not really great. It indicated promise more than fulfilled potential. But CALL THE DOCTOR was the real McCoy. It was political and feminist without preaching or being too blatant (striking the same kind of balance that The Clash excelled at). Musically, they weren't just hard rocking, but melodic even at their loudest. Although most people when talking of Sleater-Kinney's musical antecedents mention bands like Bikini Kill and Bratmobile, the name I keep thinking of when I hear they way they use guitars is that of another Portland performer: Greg Sage. Granted, Sage's band The Wipers influenced almost every Pacific Northwest band that came after it (Kurt Cobain was up front about Sage's influence on Nirvana), so Sage's influence could easily be indirect. But I'd be amazed if the band's approach wasn't to some degree in direct emulation of Sage. Whatever the source, Sleater-Kinney managed to be melodic, passionate, hard-driving, and really, really loud all at the same time. They possessed a seemingly endless supply of great musical ideas (a font that ten years later that shows no signs of going dry), innovative use of twin lead guitars (on record usually overdubbing a bass and occasionally using a bass live as well, though usually going with two guitars). And the singing is just exceptional. My three favorite female singers at present are Polly Jean Harvey, Karen O. of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Corin Tucker. This really is a band that has everything.But the thing that really shows how far Sleater-Kinney came from their debut album was the quality of the songwriting. It isn't less political (though it is less in-your-face), but the message is contained within musically compelling songs. A book I especially admire is Susan Faludi's BACKLASH: THE UNDECLARED WAR AGAINST AMERICAN WOMEN, published in 1991 about the widespread reaction to feminism that arose in the 1980s. My one disagreement with her great book is her failure to notice the tremendous gains women were making in youth culture in the late eighties and early nineties. While the nineties lacked many of the political victories that those concerned with women's issues would have liked to see, there is no question that even as Faludi wrote a host of women on the periphery were engaging in irrepressible acts of self-assertion and self-definition. Right Wing fundamentalist Beverly LaHaye might be urging women to be subservient and submissive to their husbands, but these women were having none of it. These were, after all, women who didn't want to be mothers and wives, but Joey Ramones. They weren't waiting till they grew up to be women.If you love hard rock, this is a must-own album. Not just that, you can't really claim to love hard rock if you don't own their last six albums. And it is time people started recognizing these guys for what they are: the world's best rock band. They shouldn't be opening for Pearl Jam; Pearl Jam should be opening for them.

Deuxième album du groupe. Les titres énergiques s'enchainent parfaitement avec la voix puissante et immédiatement de Corin Tucker. Un bon album, même si le meilleur est à venir. Trente minutes de punk rock efficace.