Sleater-Kinney

The Woods

(Sub Pop)

Record Review by Adam McKibbin

More than a decade into a considerable career together, Sleater-Kinney have taken another step simultaneously into the past and into the future.  First, there’s the logistics:  they staked out on their own, away from longtime co-conspirators on the label front (Kill Rock Stars, replaced by Sub Pop) and behind the production boards (John Goodmanson, replaced by Flaming Lips guru and new Sub Pop welcome wagon Dave Fridmann.  Second, and foremost, there’s the music:  muscular, defiant, desperate, as always, but with an added heft now, birthed at the altar of '70s classic rock. 

Guitar solos, 11-minute sonic sludges and cowbells aside, though, this isn’t a '70s classic rock album.  Sleater-Kinney are too multi-faceted as musicians, and, besides, as they make plainly clear in “Entertain,” they’re a bit scornful of retro acts, anyway.  On their last record, One Beat, they memorably asked “Where is the protest song?”  On “Entertain,” they ask “Where is the ‘fuck you?’  Where’s the black and blue?”  The Woods is a statement, both lyrical and musical, against sanitization.  The corresponding questions and accusations do not have the full gravity of their predecessors, which were framed by the poles of 9-11 and new motherhood, but they’re delivered with the same roaring intensity and sincerity.

“Oh Fox!  Is this love?” Corin Tucker wails on opener “The Fox,” an allegorical animal-kingdom story of predator and prey.  The answer, of course, is “...Not exactly.”  Almost any time the l-word appears on a Sleater-Kinney album, as on the beginning of Carrie Brownstein’s sunny-sounding “Modern Girl,” it’s like a quiet moment in a horror movie—you know the axe will shred through the door any minute. 

For his part, Fridmann leaves his Lips flourishes in his toolbox, instead guiding the band through buzzing, rumbling fields of distortion.  The shape-shifting occurs gradually; earlier songs like “Wilderness” and “What’s Mine Is Yours” are jaunty and angular, not radical departures (aside from the psychedelic solo that Brownstein uncorks on the latter).  Tucker and Brownstein are at their vocal yin-and-yang best on “Jumpers,” a poignant, sympathetic song about suicides on the Golden Gate Bridge.

After a slight relaxation in tempo at mid-album, drummer Janet Weiss ratchets up the intensity again on the punishing “Entertain,” leading into an end-of-album stretch that really sets The Woods apart from the back catalog.  The climax of the album is “Let’s Call It Love,” the aforementioned 11-minute odyssey, a sexual beast of a song that builds to orgiastic crescendos (see around the three-to-four minute mark) and descends into guttural valleys.  It’s hard to imagine a song better capturing the live essence and interplay between the three members, who each play an indelible part in one of America’s most continually vital bands.