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Sleater-Kinney: The Woods
Sub Pop, 2005
Rating: 4.6
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Posted: May
23,
2005
By
Peter Landwehr
Sleater-Kinney has delivered an album that should give notice to other
rock bands currently entering their second decade or longer: It’s possible
for a veteran group to expand its sound without sacrificing an ounce of
its passion or integrity. The Woods is a radical stylistic
departure from the Pacific Northwest-based trio’s previous work.
Complementary guitarists/vocalists Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein
(and drummer Janet Weiss) executed a similar stylistic shift with their
second-to-last release, 2000’s All Hands On The Bad One, in which
they used conventional pop melodies and slower, more graceful arrangements
in combination with typical fast-paced hooks and dueling vocals to craft
one of their most accessible albums. The Woods is the anti-Bad
One, burying conventional pop-rock structures beneath distorted fuzz
and an often-deafening wall of feedback to pay tribute to classic guitar
heroics. That’s not to say that The Woods isn’t accessible -- it
just doesn’t aim to please as obviously as Bad One. It's as if, having
conquered punk, Sleater-Kinney listened to old Led Zeppelin and Jimi
Hendrix albums and figured, hey, we can do that too. And, boy, do they --
masterfully so.
The Woods’ opening cut, "The Fox,” explodes with Tucker's wail
at its most shrieking-banshee arresting as she belts out lyrics that seem
inspired from a dark children's fable regarding a fox trying to coax a
duck out of the water in hopes of making a meal out of it. The track is a
declaration of war on everything one knows about the band. Weiss
pulverizes the skins, and the guitars of Brownstein and Tucker play off of
one another with furious intensity. Throughout The Woods, guitar
chords hum behind a disconcerting backfill of noise, every note treated to
the meticulous production techniques of Dave Fridmann (The Flaming Lips,
Phantom Planet, Mercury Rev).
Longtime fans may lament the dearth of tracks featuring patented
back-and-forth verses between Brownstein and Tucker, but thankfully
there’s the passionate “What's Mine Is Yours” to help ease the pain.
Backed by a rolling beat, feedback and heavy distortion, the two singers
manage to integrate the band's familiar sound with newer, more adventurous
sonic explorations (one of the least of which being a sustained,
feedback-fed guitar solo). "Jumpers" is a dark duet about leaping off the
Golden Gate Bridge that brilliantly self-destructs the moment its main
subject strikes the water. "Rollercoaster" is an exultant combination of
peppy handclaps, cowbell and ooh-wa choruses that ruminates on
relationships and their similarity to (yes, you guessed it) an
amusement-park ride.
There's the solid groove on "Wilderness" that struts its way across the
great pacific northwest, and the rapturous, folksy “Modern Girl,” the
finest ironically sweet song that Sleater-Kinney has ever made, building
light guitars and drums to a climactic, wonderfully static-y pile-up as
Brownstein despairs over being put on a pedestal ("My baby loves me / I'm
so angry / Anger makes me a modern girl"). But the album’s centerpiece is
actually the penultimate track, the sexually-charged, sweaty "Let's Call
It Love", which is essentially an elongated jam session that segues
flawlessly into the reflective, at-wit’s-end closer, “Night Light.”
The fact that a band spawned over ten years ago is so willing to try
new things is refreshing, but with The Woods, Sleater-Kinney has
surpassed even its most ardent supporter’s expectations as to the artistic
heights the trio can attain. Regardless of what one says about the nature
of development vs. experimentation, The Woods is an undeniably
varied collection of songs that cohere beautifully -- tracks throb with
chunky guitars and beats that are both strident and irregular, coming
together to give muscle to the album's stated theme: the darker regions of
the human heart (thematic material that, if not handled carefully, could
easily lead to generic "emo" rock with nothing to say beyond woe-is-me
angst). Toss in the homage to rock gods of yesteryear and it all adds up
to the finest album Sleater-Kinney has burned onto tape.
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