By now you probably don't need to be told the particulars of Sleater-Kinney's new album, The Woods: about how they signed with Sub Pop, making it their first album since 1995's Call the Doctor not released by Kill Rock Stars; about how they hired Dave Fridmann to produce and recorded it in rural New York instead of Washington State; about how they wanted a heavier sound that mines classic rock like Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, and Jimi Hendrix for inspiration; about how one song is more than 11 minutes in length.
So it should come as no surprise that The Woods marks a significant transformation for the band-- one they first hinted at on 2000's All Hands on the Bad One, and crept closer toward on 2002's One Beat. Nor should anyone be shocked that, despite the new song structures, guitar solos, and drum fills, Brownstein's guitar still roars wildly, Weiss's drums still thunder, and Tucker still wails with a primal urgency that is one of the most compelling sounds in rock music today. What hasn't necessarily been made explicitly clear is that, even in the face of its cock-rock trappings, The Woods most closely recalls the righteous fury of their first great albums, Call the Doctor (1995) and Dig Me Out (1996).
The brash economy of punk, for Sleater-Kinney at least, has always been just a short step away from the lumbering behemoth of hard rock. "The Fox", however, seems to say otherwise. Opening the album, this piece of Aesop rock is about a fox and a duck, and I think it just might be allegorical. But it's loud and it thrashes and Tucker shouts to be heard over the din. It's ferociously uninviting, but it works both as a context-providing preface to the nine songs that follow and as a deterrent for weak-eared listeners. Those who make it to "Wilderness" will have passed a test of sorts.
"Wilderness" and most of "What's Mine Is Yours" sound like prime Sleater-Kinney, as does much of the rest of The Woods. Fridmann's presence is far from disruptive; you can hardly hear him in the mix, except for a little sludge in the low end-- a nice substitution for a bass player. Instead of weighing them down with single-mic'd Flaming Lips drums or Delgados density, he simply steps out of the way and allows them to sound larger, louder, and looser.
Turning their crosshairs away from the overt political issues of One Beat, Sleater-Kinney's amplification here sounds like a reaction to the current wave of backwards-looking boys-club bands that idolize post-punk dramatists like Joy Division and the Cure and abstractors like Gang of Four and Wire. (And anyway, weren't the women of Elastica working this same nostalgia, like, 10 years ago?) On "Entertain"-- the first single, no less-- Brownstein chides the eyeliner brigade righteously: "You come around looking 1984/ You're such a bore, 1984/ Nostalgia, you're using it like a whore/ It's better than before."
But Sleater-Kinney are looking backwards too, albeit to a different time in rock history and to different styles, as well as with a greater open-mindedness and self-awareness. Many of the hard-rock trappings of The Woods sound self-conscious: Leading into the album-closing "Night Light", the 11-minute guitar solo on "Let's Call It Love" is just that-- an 11-Minute Guitar Solo. The badass breakdown on "What's Mine Is Yours" is just that-- a Badass Breakdown. But the point of "Let's Call It Love" is the equation of music and sex as Brownstein sings, "I've got a long time for love" and then proves it with her guitar. And the point of "What's Mine Is Yours" is, as the lyrics reveal, not the breakdown but the recovery: As Brownstein's guitar squawks boisterously and arrhythmically, Tucker stitches it together with a low Led Zep riff and Weiss wraps it up with a big drum beat, all three of them literally creating music from chaos.
In other words, this hard-rock transformation sounds like an extension of all the meta songs they've been writing since before "I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone"-- rock-about-rock songs that chronicle their experience as an all-woman band and that deploy that self-reflexivity as a weapon against industry double standards and general ignorance. In the past, this self-awareness often resulted in songs that sounded closed-off, each with its own extremely precise meaning that related but didn't always connect to other songs around it. The Woods, on the other hand, is their most album-like album since The Hot Rock, each song building on the previous and leading to the next. With its artificially sweetened melody, "Modern Girl", for instance, almost sounds saccharine ("My whole life is like a picture of a sunny day"), but coming after "Jumpers", a song so empathetic it considers suicide a viable act of defiance, "Modern Girl" takes on deeper meanings. The pair are two sides of the same woman, the ultimate predicament: To survive these days, you have to be either suicidal or superficial. Sleater-Kinney, meanwhile, get by simply sounding fucking supersonic.
