Show Biz Truism Proven?
Just watched Sleater-Kinney performing on the David Letterman show, and I can state with certainty that the TV camera really did add some weight. Not 72 hours earlier, I saw the band at the Trocodero in Philadelphia, and they looked (and sounded) great--and at least ten pounds, per S-K member, lighter than they did on TV. I tend to blame the cameras rather than my own lyin' eyes.

I know Sleater-Kinney has played the Conan O'Brien show, where they acquitted themselves very well a couple years back; whether or not this was their first Letterman appearance, I'm not sure. But they seemed nervous. It maybe didn't help that the song they performed, "Jumpers," is both much more structured and dependent upon dynamic changes than most of their new batch of tunes... nor that it's about a suicide plunge off the Golden Gate Bridge. The first single, "Entertain," probably would have been a better choice, though maybe the band or the show was unwilling to chance lyrics that include an F-bomb (a rarity for this band). In any event, Corin Tucker's vocals betrayed a slight waver, and Carrie Brownstein looked like she was too consciously trying to rock out. Though she did display a leg kick that Roger Daltrey, let alone Robert Pollard, couldn't dream of pulling off. The mix also did them no favors.

This was all in contrast to the show last Friday night, in which they kicked the hell out of nine songs from their latest album, "The Woods," and seemed utterly relaxed in doing so. I wonder if the band members, who seem to enjoy a pretty good lifestyle as well as an intensely devoted and fairly sizeable following, are motivated to make appearances like tonight's out of their own drive to reach more fans, make more money, and extend their reach, or just because it's the done thing but they don't intrinsically care. They changed labels for the latest album, which seems to suggest some unmet ambition on the business end of things, but then made probably their least accessible album in a decade. Perhaps it's no more reasonable to expect consistency, much less clear lines of cause and effect, from hard-rocking strangers as from anyone else.