Wild Flag - Wild Flag

Wild Flag is being touted as a supergroup, which it technically is, but it's also technically just what you get if Sleater-Kinney hired a keyboardist and replaced Corin Tucker with Mary Timony. Whenever any of those people release something it reminds me of my late uncle, who was a Sleater-Kinney fan in Australia from about as far back as you can get. He would have loved this shit. They'd have you believe it's also what you get if you cross a hamburger with a hotdog. Yummy.

The sound of Wild Flag is predictably that of Mary Timony's circuitous yet disciplined guitar passages grafted onto Sleater-Kinney's bombast, but it's predictable in a "why didn't they think of that ages ago?" kind of way. Minus keyboardist Rebecca Cole, these people have been playing together in various combinations for nearly two decades, and it shows. Timony is the kind of guitarist who can carry an album by herself - see her last two solo albums for proof - but thanks to Carrie Brownstein, she doesn't have to. The two of them have each other's backs all the way through and explore many tangents that would have been impossible on their own.

I admit to a certain amount of bias, but I've gotta say Timony is the MVP here. In addition to her exquisite guitar playing, she's technically a better vocalist than Brownstein, who has less range and sometimes adopts an almost cockney affectation, though to be fair, Brownstein's clipped delivery suits the faster paced songs which Timony may have stumbled over. But really everyone is on point here; Cole's keyboards expand the melodic possibilities while drummer Janet Weiss is in great form...but when is she ever not?

Wild Flag packs a lot of detail into 39 minutes, but is short on genuine proggy epics. "Glass Tambourine" more than satisfies in that regard, but "Racehorse" really overstays its welcome. I wish they'd scrapped that one, added another minute to "Glass Tambourine" and thrown in another short song. So while nothing here is as ambitious as The Magic City, the second and last album from Timony's massively underrated 90s band Helium, a lot of it is almost as catchy. That's more than any of us deserve.

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