Sat Sept 28 and Sun Sept 29, Showbox, $10.

"All I have, all I am, all I can/For him... "

These are not lines you'd expect to hear in a Sleater-Kinney song, at least not without remove or reproach. But not only do the lines appear--in "Sympathy," the final song on the band's latest album, One Beat--they're the refrain. More striking is the fact that the lines are delivered not through the filter of some weak-willed woman narrator, as might be assumed, but by Corin Tucker at her rawest. Even from a band that has always been defined by the directness of its music, "Sympathy" is a shocker, a naked fever of confession, anguish, and surrender made all the more harrowing because it's addressed to God.

Sleater-Kinney spent its last two albums experimenting. Though full of excellent things, both The Hot Rock and All Hands on the Bad One felt like pieces of a collage that had not yet been fully visualized. One Beat completes the mural, synthesizing adventurous energy with the visceral abandon that makes the band a phenomenon to behold. Though the performances on the new record are often playful--Carrie Brownstein's vocals are particularly theatrical--the songs are fraught with personal urgency, a desire to express the state of the self in a world gone wrong. Nowhere is that self laid barer than on "Sympathy," a song that introduces a new theme to the self-determined world of Sleater-Kinney music: supplication.

"I know I come to you only when in need," Tucker sings over a raw, bluesy slide guitar. "I'm not the best believer, not the most deserving... " This common confession sets the stage for a reluctant prayer--reluctant because it forces the singer to admit a grudging belief in a power greater than her own, but also because it derives from an elemental human terror. "Sympathy" is about an imperiled pregnancy. An unborn child--"precious baby, is your life hanging by a thread?"--is the "him" for whom Tucker would give all she is, but her will proves useless, so she turns elsewhere ("I'd beg you on bended knee for him"), and the song turns, too.

Enter Carrie Brownstein. Tucker's lone blues line gives way to an ominous guitar duet as Brownstein reaches down into the subconscious to echo and expand upon her partner's dismay. "I've got this curse on my hands," she sings. "All I touch fades to black, turns to dust, turns to sand." It's a less specific confession, but no less brutal; the words nail the impotent fury of watching a friend go through hell, the fruitless desire to take the suffering on yourself. This is the sympathy the title refers to, and as the nightmare scenes--"the doctor with the deep long face" who "only wants to give us the very worst case"--unfold, the expression of Brownstein and Tucker's musical symbiosis becomes more resonant than ever.

When an artist as righteous as Corin Tucker declares that "there's no righteousness in your darkest moment," it forces a reckoning. No matter what your politics, no matter how good your band is, you will die, and only "in the face of what we're most afraid of" can we ever know what we truly believe. Brownstein's voice breaks audibly as she sings the lines that sum up not only the song, but the process by which her band endures. "I look for hope in the dark, the shadow cast by your heart/It's the grammar of faith—no more rules, no restraints."

"Sympathy" is about birth and death, but it's really about the fear that attends them both in equal measures. For the mother in the song (Is it really Tucker, whose beautiful, healthy toddler is pictured in the sleeve?), the fear yields the revelation of what truly matters most. For the band playing the song, the fear adds severity to the fearlessness on which they have founded their musical dialogue. For both, it leads to a choice. In the face of death and life, Sleater-Kinney chooses the grammar of faith. And they answer it for each other.

"How angry I would be if you'd taken him away," Tucker warns as "Sympathy" and One Beat wind to a close. "I wish I was wiser but instead, I'll be grateful... " In these plain lines, everything about Sleater-Kinney changes; a voice famous for its strength admits an absolute weakness, and in doing so, achieves a power greater than any of its faithful listeners ever imagined.