My favorite Sleater Kinney by leaps and bounds
Maybe I started out in the wrong place with Sleater-Kinney, but after being underwhelmed by "Dig Me Out" and "The Hot Rock" I was about to give up on the band. Then I heard "I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone" and was blown away. I decided to give the band another try and I am very glad I did because this is definitely one of the greatest punk records of the 90s and before. I've realized lately that I use a lot of hyperbole in my reviews, but this time the cd actually is that good.

I'm not the kind of guy who likes overly complicated art rock, and the sparse instrumentation and the more experimental music on the later albums isn't something that interested me, especially "The Hot Rock" which I could only listen to once. Don't get me wrong, "Dig Me Out" had it's moments though, especially "Jenny", "Dig Me Out", and "Words and Guitar". But this album is much more straight forward and punk influenced without a single weak link.

I do have some favorites on this album which are "Stay Where You Are", "I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone" (That song is an anthem that leaps out of the speakers), and "I'm Not Waiting" (The chorus is visceral). Definitely on par with Bikini Kill's "Pussy Whipped" (And maybe better), this album is excellent.

Totally rocks. Doesn't do much else, but doesn't need to
Take Cheap Trick, Patti Smith, the Ramones and feminist rage and put them in a blender, and this is what you come out with. The songs are quick, catchy, angry, and singer Corrin Tucker sounds like Patti Smith. Even some of our weak tracks are so short that they don't stick around long enough to get on your nerves ("Little Mouth"; "Hubcap"), and the stronger songs leave you begging for more (the raging title song; "Anonymous", with an awesome, off-kilter guitar tone). And the counterpoint chorus harmonies are amazing (as heard on "Stay Where You Are"). There's also some humor (the outrageously catchy "I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone"), and the lyrics are often great ("Taking Me Home"). And those oddly tuned guitars ain't no gimmick: they create an ominous, suspenseful sound on the tension build-and-release "My Stuff". I do think that, by the end, sameness factor really starts to set in and bore. But do you wanna rock? Yeah? Good! Oh, and I know that this was aimed at women, but I'm a man and I like this. A feminist man, mind you, so maybe that's why I like it. Or maybe it's just because I like to rock. Who knows?

Call the Doctor ...Punk Rock to Stop my Heart
Sleater-Kinney one of the better Punk Rock Bands of the 1990s. These Girls have something to say.. hailing from Olympia- They're an All - Girl later 'riot grrrl' act inspired by earlier all girl groups such as Bikini Kill -(which I don't really care for).
Sleater-Kinney first formed in 1994 and I believe they recently broke up, or are taking some time off.
This is Explosive punk rock! ..and I just Love Corin Tucker's operatic vibrato - really screaming! she has gorgeous orgasmically gleeful fun on this album's finest track - "I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone" (infectious and catchy)- where she claims that she is the queen of Rock 'n' Roll, and Hey who are we to disagree?-
"Call the Doctor's" other Faves for me include the Opener -title track-
"Anonymous" - "Stay Where You Are" & "Good Things"
After this release Sleater-Kinney drew in slight criticism for 1997s "Dig Me Out" - which contained a more pop sound -although great all the same.
Yeah "Call the Doctor" all in all is a pure punk album all the way through these 12 Glorious tracks; One of the Best 30 minutes I have spent listening to a Punk album.

Outstanding! An Impassioned Call to Arms--4.5 stars!
This is one of the craftiest, most intelligent and still downright behind-kicking albums that I've ever heard. Sleater-Kinney has their interlocking, intertwining dual guitar attack down packed on this release. They have this extraordinary chemistry and they are able to combine melodic range with frenetic and unmannered punk intensity in a way that I've seldom seen realized. The title track, which leads the album off, seems to be a call to arms to fight to maintain one's individual identity, resisting being socialized to simply exist and/or simply become someone else's possession (the inspiring independence/autonomy anthem "Take Me Home" drives this message home brilliantly). The intense energy of the title track strikes me as a reaction to the thought of being forced to become just another sheep in the herd. Carrie Brownstein sings the background counterpoint to Corin Tucker's lead vocal during the chorus on almost every song (it's often barely audible due to the raw mixing, but if it weren't for that, the album likely wouldn't have the same intensity or strong sense of urgency), and my favorite line in the title track is when Brownstein, in her usual deadpan style, sings "call the doctor...miracle she can talk"!. This sarcastic line pretty much sums up the entire album conceptually: "wow, she actually has her own "voice", she actually has her own individual thoughts and ideas!" This central theme exists throughout the entire album. "Anonymous" is about a girl who lives life firmly within safe and conventional well-drawn lines, effectively forgoing the chance to make her own unique mark in life. "Stay Where You Are" and "Good Things" do a great job of showing off their range both as musicians and songwriters. "Good Things" is incredibly moving and finds the band in a more pensive mood than they are anywhere else on the album. The more I listen to this, the more I feel like it was one of the best albums of the 90's. They combine intelligent themes with punk intensity and detailed musicianship to come up with some of the most purely volatile rock of the entire decade. This album is a gem.

By any measure, a flat out musical masterpiece
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.