At any rate, somehow this album weaseled its way into my existence as something I ought to be excited about, and the reason I didn't immediately spot the misunderstanding is that listening to it does, in fact, excite me. Lest this fate befall you, as well, I will supply two crucial caveats. The first is that singer Fleming McWilliams' loud mode, which gets used at least once in almost every song, sounds something like Harriet Wheeler from the Sundays being electrocuted, and can make Alanis Morissette's seem comparatively muted and soothing. The second is that Painter, who generates all the music on this record save the drums (played by Fleming's brother Shawn), some strings, Fleming's flute and pump organ on one song, and backing vocals on one other by Ben Folds, is a musical polyglot whose amiable style-hopping you might well consider, if your aesthetic heroes are punk hardliners who refuse to learn that principle-compromising fourth chord, facile and undisciplined. Combined, these two elements produce music that you would be within your rights to regard as simultaneously mundane and nerve-shredding.

But I love Alanis far too much for "mundane music" to be the end of an argument, and I've learned that the sensation that I am bleeding from the ears is rarely the product of genuine injury, and so I don't have to negotiate any particularly complicated truce with my moral standards in order to enjoy this record. Playing the first thirty seconds of "I'm So Small" through a telephone (or, more likely, through an extremely expensive equalizer designed to impart the minimum possible spectrum shaping to convey the impression of telephone fidelity) is hardly an innovation, but Fleming's keening, para-Eastern vocal flourishes on the crazed, lurching chorus, bolstered by Painter's theremin in case that wasn't enough keening by itself, make me shiver pleasantly, and I like the low buzzing noise that accompanies the dry drum loop, like a generator leaking. And "That's why I wear my hair so big. / Some people think it might be a wig, / But it's all part of my plot / To prove I'm not a dot", despite the spaghetti-western guitar twang it tangles with, is basically the same timeless rock frustration as "No one notices; / I think I'll dye my hair blue", just formed in a later grammar. Clanging timpani and chimes boost the pealing "Sssh!" into an orbit they were probably keeping free in case Lita Ford decided to cover Alanis' "Hand in My Pocket" as part of a comeback rock opera. The moody pizzicato hooks of "The Pearl" sound to me like they were pilfered from the Parachute Club's "Middle Child", but since I fear no one other than me remembers that, I suppose F&J might as well return them to circulation, and the churning choruses they lead to, here, are closer to Stabbing Westward than the Parachute Club. The shiny, maudlin ballad "Comfortable" might have bored me in other months, but it's been a while since I've heard anything from Roxette's Per Gessle or Marry Me Jane's Amanda Kravat, two of the writers that can still bind me with spells woven from these familiar threads, and Painter makes a plausible case for his own inclusion with some adroit intermingling of twittering drum machines, epic string arrangements and aching harmony vocals. The gentle "Don't Let It Fade Away", all pillowy strings and lullaby acoustic-guitar strumming, gives Fleming a rare showcase for her prettier modes, which lend the song an aura that can't seem to decide whether it owes more to Kate Bush's "The Kick Inside" or the Eagles' "New Kid in Town". I think "The Way We Are" is Fleming & John's Cardigans pastiche, but it spans the Cardigans jazz- and jagged-pop extremes with perhaps, at least for me, more aplomb than the Cardigans themselves have so far mustered. The sunny pop vibe settles in for a while, permeating the bouncy "Radiate", sparkling with flugelhorn and trombone, the xylophone-heavy "Ugly Girl", which is an unmistakable descendant of Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams" (and Fleetwood Mac are the only band on my CD shelves between Fledgling and Fleming & John; these connections will eat your cerebellum if you aren't careful), the sultry "Sadder Day", part languid funk and part Blondie's "Rapture", and even "Rain All Day", which reminds me vividly enough of the Parachute Club's "Innuendo" that I wonder if it isn't intentional after all. They do eventually reapply the warpaint, though, in time to storm through "Devil's Food", which might be Siouxsie and the Banshees doing a new theme song for Dr. Who, and shiver into a Tori- and Kate-indebted "Suppressed Emotions". The credits insist Folds is only singing on "I Fall for You", but Painter takes his presence as an excuse for a funhouse piano romp of his own, and enough florid accordions and glassy vibes to placate a militant circus. "That's All I Know" alternates between brass-section jump and a stentorian chorus thrash, and while the thrash sounds more sincere, to me, than the jump, "The Hidden Track" turns out to be a cartoonish cocktail-party remake of "I'm So Small", so maybe I'm wrong. I still feel like this record represents more potential than accomplishment, and my suspicion is that I'd like Fleming & John better if they didn't try to split their energies between kitsch and crunch, but I'll buy the next one fully aware of what I'm doing.

But if you can accept, on faith if need be, that to Sleater-Kinney these clusters of notes are melodies, then there are several ways listening might be rewarding. First, this is disconcerting music, and maybe your musical universe doesn't disconcert you enough. Sleater-Kinney didn't invent this style, and aren't its only practitioners (Team Dresch, Bikini Kill and Bratmobile all might come before Sleater-Kinney in my personal ordering, and I don't pretend to know enough about this culture to guess whether there are a dozen more I'd also prefer), but for some reason they've garnered more mainstream press than most of their peers, so knowing what they sound like is marginally more likely to one day be useful in a conversation. Second, Sleater-Kinney have an odd penchant for inserting standard pop tricks, particularly drum patterns, in places and with timings that undermine their nominal propulsive purposes. A steady groove will suddenly develop a limp, or will snap into a different tempo with no warning. Where the drummers in much of conventional pop often act as glorified metronomes, Janet Weiss has as much to do with the strange articulation of Sleater-Kinney songs as either guitarist, and the absence of bass parts helps emphasize the individual nuances of her playing. Sleater-Kinney are an instructive example of how complexity can re-arise from a style that began as a deconstruction of something else, and while I'd probably start that lesson elsewhere for historical reasons (this was the implicit central tenet of Post-Punk, although the first two Fugazi albums, a decade later, are my favorite demonstration of the process, personally; a course of study that leads more directly to Sleater-Kinney, gender politics and all, might begin with the Au Pairs), there's nothing especially terrible about working through it in reverse.

The thing that nagged at me, however, as Dig Me Out showed up on best-album lists at the end of 1997 (not enough of them for it to really matter, but enough that I noticed), is that Sleater-Kinney were also heralded as standard bearers for the lesbian community, poets willing to take on serious gender issues rock usually shies away from. Maybe in interviews they were, but the lyrics to Dig Me Out seem mostly banal and sing-song, to me, and if they address controversial sexual topics, they do it so obliquely that I can't find where. There are more songs whose lyrics I admire on The Hot Rock, but they're about random things. "Don't Talk Like" is a relationship song about immaturity, and doesn't have any gender bias. "Get Up" is about losing yourself, in various ways, but it passes up numerous opportunities to insert suggestive pronouns. "God Is a Number" belongs to a long tradition of rock songs about the mechanization of human society. "The Size of Our Love" is a remarkable lovers' deathbed anthem (I don't expect to hear many opening lines more arresting than "Our love is the size of these tumors inside us", in which the tumors are literal and the "us" is metaphorical). These are fine things to write songs about, and it's no fault of Sleater-Kinney's what other people's articles have encouraged me to expect. But the subject is on my mind this week, as I listen to The Hot Rock and my catch-up program reaches Team Dresch, so when I discover that Team Dresch write the gender-political songs Sleater-Kinney do not, and then discover that while I admire Sleater-Kinney's songs, I like Team Dresch's, it's easy to conclude, as I'd be inclined to anyway, that people who don't know much about this world picked a representative at random, and didn't get the one I'd have chosen. I have to listen to The Hot Rock through a layer of intellectual redirection, appreciating its musical agenda only by explaining to myself what its postulates are. Team Dresch are aggressive, too, but they aren't evasive, and I can enjoy their songs just by listening to them. So maybe I'm lazy, and am allowing myself to be drawn to the band I can understand better without challenging the assumptions that underlie my appreciation of music. Maybe. On the other hand, though, at the end of Personal Best I feel like I've learned something about a culture I'm not likely to get any closer to than this, and I've also had more fun. And so one disc goes on the shelf, and the other starts again, from the beginning.