Sleater-Kinney - The Woods

Sleater-Kinney
The Woods
Sub Pop Records
Grade: A-

With guitars blazing, Sleater-Kinney rips off ten tracks of reckless abandon on their seventh record and first for Sub Pop. After a decade of recording for KRS, Portland’s veteran punk trio Sleater-Kinney went to rural New York and hoped into bed with the other hot northwestern label. While my familiarity in Sleater-Kinney songs is much less than knowledge of their musical impact and history, it is clear that the trio decide to get their rock on with the Woods. Carrie Brownstein’s guitar is a display of brilliant distorted wildness, Corin Tucker leads the vocals and guitar support and Janet Weiss keeps the beats fresh. The core of Sleater-Kinney is still here, most obviously pushed by Tucker’s intense, shouting vocals, but it is as if the band brought Zeppelin back from the dead or decided to channel some type of Mars Volta throwback. The two most exemplar demonstrations of this shift come from “What’s Mine is Yours” and “Let’s Call It Love.” “What’s Mine is Yours” is classic Sleater-Kinney with back-and-forth guitar movements, until about half way through where shit goes wild and Brownstein’s guitar noisily solos. “What’s Mine is Yours,” though, only sets up “Let’s Call It Love” towards the end of the record. “Let’s Call It Love” is all about soaring distorted rock first pushed by guitars and Tucker’s vocals and then extended to the tune of eleven minutes as the band seemingly goes off into their own version of an acid trip. The other eight numbers maintain similar thoughts of over-distortion and a call to the rock gods, but just not taken to the same extreme. For instance, you are greeted on the opener “The Fox” with extreme distortion and then breaks down to Tucker and the rest following a consistent pattern. “Wilderness” is more pop with pleasant guitar picking, while “Jumpers” features Brownstein and Tucker paralleling their vocals for a cool effect on the first part and then goes off. “Modern Girl” is probably has the cleanest instruments (until the end) and demonstrates how Sleater-Kinney could knock out radio friendly indie pop for all of eternity if they so chose. The vocals shriek in the background to the hip “Entertain” and “Rollercoaster” contains the oft-heard indie guitar riffs. The tempo is brought down on “Steep Air” as Sleater-Kinney dirty fuzz everything out. The Woods ends on the well-conceived, even-balanced “Night Light” – almost serving as a symbol for the consistency and stability of Sleater-Kinney. Although The Woods is more Zeppelin rock than much of their previous catalogue, most Sleater-Kinney fans are going to eat this up and the record is also likely to snare proponents of distorted 70s rock comebacks.