A dissertation on Sleater-Kinney's The Woods, as promised:
When Orson Welles directed The Stranger, he had decided to take Hollywood on by its own standards, with its own money and stars. He ran on time and under budget, and accommodated character actor Edward G. Robinson for the lead role instead of casting Agnes Moorehead, whom Welles originally had in mind. The final product, however, suffered because of Welles struggles with studio execs over the script, the unauthorized scene edits by a producer, and practically every other detail imaginable. Both a modest box office success and artistic letdown, The Stranger was later recanted by Welles as sub par.
Sleater-Kinney, increasingly frustrated with the state of mainstream rock and the mass cultures consequential blind eye, has also decided to take on postmodern rock n roll by its terms instead of their own. They hired a semi-experimental rock producer, Dave Fridmann, who helmed the Flaming Lips overrated The Soft Bulletin and other innocuous lite-indie rock favorites. They used traditional production techniquesinstead of straight-forward, equally mixed vocal recordings, for instance, theyre now using effects andthe shockauthentic back-up vocals slightly buried in the mix. They eschewed their now-typical agitfemprop lyrics and embraced more universal, easily relatable metaphors. They did all of this while creating one of the most transcendent, compellingly human rock n roll recordings of the postmodern era. But instead of internalizing these mainstream production values, its as though Sleater-Kinney are taking them head-on, an artistic confrontation of Nietzsche-an proportions.
Like last years Sonic Nurse, The Woods is an amalgamation of every artistic development Sleater-Kinney has made in their twelve-year existenceif their previous efforts were just tasty, nutritious nuggets, The Woods is their fucking meal plan. These Woods are a dense habitat, sonically, thematically, emotionally, and spiritually, and the record revisits old themes while dusting them with the new Sleater-Kinney Solidified Songwriting Polish. The tracks were obviously ordered with a double-LP in mind, each series of two to three songs bleeding into one another and abruptly shifting in tone for the next side. This album as a whole forms a injured, shimmering crescendo, before gracefully plummeting from the sky like a dying phoenix, only to set the whole damn forest ablazethis is the record Sleater-Kinney fans and critics always knew they had in them but for some reason they were too timid to make.
The production values of The Woods still maintain the tension found in Sleater-Kinneys repertoire, but it improves upon past albums to actually capture the ferocity and intensity of their live shows. Vocal performances are top-notch here. Carrie Brownstein has never sounded so confident, so passionate, so unafraid to be ugly and harsh, with highly effective results. While Corin Tuckers voice is always in rare form, her singing on The Woods reveals an emotional range only hinted at during their early recordings. Like Bessie Smith, Tucker has a voice which no recording device could possibly preserve, the sounds of life and death and pure sonic energy entangled in the concrete surface of her throat. Janet Weisss incredible drum recording techniques of One Beat are maintained as well, controlling and adding to the tension and interplay between Brownstein and Tucker. The Woods also shows that Sleater-Kinney shouldve dumped John Goodmanson years agoimagine the records they couldve made after The Hot Rock if only theyd kept working with different producers. I say its about fucking time they received proper studio treatment.
As for songwriting and composition, the lyrics are still political but indirectly so. Nothing as straight-forward as Culture is what we make it, yes it is/Now is the time to invent comes across on The Woods; instead, Sleater-Kinney is finally taking their own advice and inventing. The words here are more oblique, less projected; the metaphors are less pretentious. The instrumentation has some noticeable differences as well. More noise is allowed, it seems, in The Woods, and Tuckers guitar lines are much less rudimentary than in the past. Brownsteins playing style is still so distinct, but her fingerwork is less angular, and more fluid, than usual, though this was also hinted at during some of the more sublime moments of One Beat. Musically the album is much more complex, and the songs build on Sleater-Kinneys experiments with form. Since I do not have lyric sheets at hand, I can only guess at the words, so my interpretations of some of these songs are probably wrong.
The train-wreck guitars of the opener, The Fox, turn the One Beat-era child-love outtake Lions and Tigers on its head, revealing an animal kingdom of deception and revenge. That duck might be able to shake the water from his feathers now, but once the fox rattles the babe in his teeth, aint nothing that will protect that birdthank God we like the underdog in the US of A, or that duckling would never survive. Either that, or Tuckers been reading too many childrens booksregardless, Im not complaining.
All our little wishes have run dry/Made it to the water, wade it in the lies/[...]Too caught up in our own desires. Wilderness, like Robinsons detective, wants to sort out those whove allowed complacency to lock into American culture, seeing culture war victims, criminals, and sell-outs everywhere.
Both Whats Mine Is Yours and Jumpers seem shaped by Brownsteins brief tenure at UC Berkeleys journalism graduate program, reflecting the loneliness and frustration of physical, intellectual, and cultural displacement. The guitars stutter along nervously in both songs, Whats Mine Is Yours including a fuzzed-out solo from Brownstein and a murky bridge.
Modern Girl is the single most cynical song in Sleater-Kinneys catalog. Brownsteins vocalsno, huffingooze with bitterness, contrasting perfectly with the deceptively sunny but vicious, anti-consumerist lyrics. The protagonist's whole life looks like a sunny day, but only because she thinks she can buy happiness.
Truth is manmade. As for bravery, Sleater-Kinney has never lacked it, and Entertain is one of the bravest songs ever written. Johnny, get your gun. Your culture is lying to you, your government is lying to you, Brownstein is lying to you, rip me open, its so pretty. Where the fuck were you in 1972? Wheres the black and blue? This song is whats bruising, because American culture is cruising for it. This isnt just about reality TV, its about TV dictating reality when, like in Wilderness, the lies behind the facade should be so fucking obvious.
Carnival atmosphere presides in Rollercoaster, where cherry tomatoes, saving the unripe ideas for later, and tilt-a-whirls rule the day. Certainly the poppiest song on the record, it also presides over one of the sharpest tone shifts on record, the last breath of warm breeze before the winter sets in.
The ending sequence on the record creeps up like a fall storm, the final triptych closing off The Woods for imminent destruction. Steep Air slowly grinds in your ear and lap, all while Brownstein whispers the water is bloody with the one who came before. Im tired of knocking on a door that just wont budge, Tucker replies, sounding like she wants to pilot that plane straight into the water.
Lets Call It Love brought me to tears the first time I listened to it, its intense, psychotic instrumentation coalescing into a frantic bridge before briefly touching back to the original melody and swooping into a lengthy jam hypersonic freakout, church bells and all. I wont let you out til Ive had enough! This logically merges with the pensive Night Light, which like One Beats Sympathy focuses on spiritual aspects of natural processes. Visions of woods, to come live in the present and spend all the rest of the sun, closing with a descending guitar line reminiscent of The Swimmer.
The Woods, along with recent releases from Comets On Fire and Wolf Eyes, is the center jewel of the new Sub Pop crown, which after many years of being just another ironic indie rock punch line is finally back as the apex of the most creative, exuberant music being crafted today. And if Sleater-Kinney manages to do what our beloved Welles couldntworking within current industry standards and trends while birthing a piece both accessible and complexthen what once thought impossible will come to pass, and the influence and impact Sleater-Kinney deserves to make will finally, at long last, come screaming all alone through the wilderness, loud and fucking clear.
When Orson Welles directed The Stranger, he had decided to take Hollywood on by its own standards, with its own money and stars. He ran on time and under budget, and accommodated character actor Edward G. Robinson for the lead role instead of casting Agnes Moorehead, whom Welles originally had in mind. The final product, however, suffered because of Welles struggles with studio execs over the script, the unauthorized scene edits by a producer, and practically every other detail imaginable. Both a modest box office success and artistic letdown, The Stranger was later recanted by Welles as sub par.
Sleater-Kinney, increasingly frustrated with the state of mainstream rock and the mass cultures consequential blind eye, has also decided to take on postmodern rock n roll by its terms instead of their own. They hired a semi-experimental rock producer, Dave Fridmann, who helmed the Flaming Lips overrated The Soft Bulletin and other innocuous lite-indie rock favorites. They used traditional production techniquesinstead of straight-forward, equally mixed vocal recordings, for instance, theyre now using effects andthe shockauthentic back-up vocals slightly buried in the mix. They eschewed their now-typical agitfemprop lyrics and embraced more universal, easily relatable metaphors. They did all of this while creating one of the most transcendent, compellingly human rock n roll recordings of the postmodern era. But instead of internalizing these mainstream production values, its as though Sleater-Kinney are taking them head-on, an artistic confrontation of Nietzsche-an proportions.
Like last years Sonic Nurse, The Woods is an amalgamation of every artistic development Sleater-Kinney has made in their twelve-year existenceif their previous efforts were just tasty, nutritious nuggets, The Woods is their fucking meal plan. These Woods are a dense habitat, sonically, thematically, emotionally, and spiritually, and the record revisits old themes while dusting them with the new Sleater-Kinney Solidified Songwriting Polish. The tracks were obviously ordered with a double-LP in mind, each series of two to three songs bleeding into one another and abruptly shifting in tone for the next side. This album as a whole forms a injured, shimmering crescendo, before gracefully plummeting from the sky like a dying phoenix, only to set the whole damn forest ablazethis is the record Sleater-Kinney fans and critics always knew they had in them but for some reason they were too timid to make.
The production values of The Woods still maintain the tension found in Sleater-Kinneys repertoire, but it improves upon past albums to actually capture the ferocity and intensity of their live shows. Vocal performances are top-notch here. Carrie Brownstein has never sounded so confident, so passionate, so unafraid to be ugly and harsh, with highly effective results. While Corin Tuckers voice is always in rare form, her singing on The Woods reveals an emotional range only hinted at during their early recordings. Like Bessie Smith, Tucker has a voice which no recording device could possibly preserve, the sounds of life and death and pure sonic energy entangled in the concrete surface of her throat. Janet Weisss incredible drum recording techniques of One Beat are maintained as well, controlling and adding to the tension and interplay between Brownstein and Tucker. The Woods also shows that Sleater-Kinney shouldve dumped John Goodmanson years agoimagine the records they couldve made after The Hot Rock if only theyd kept working with different producers. I say its about fucking time they received proper studio treatment.
As for songwriting and composition, the lyrics are still political but indirectly so. Nothing as straight-forward as Culture is what we make it, yes it is/Now is the time to invent comes across on The Woods; instead, Sleater-Kinney is finally taking their own advice and inventing. The words here are more oblique, less projected; the metaphors are less pretentious. The instrumentation has some noticeable differences as well. More noise is allowed, it seems, in The Woods, and Tuckers guitar lines are much less rudimentary than in the past. Brownsteins playing style is still so distinct, but her fingerwork is less angular, and more fluid, than usual, though this was also hinted at during some of the more sublime moments of One Beat. Musically the album is much more complex, and the songs build on Sleater-Kinneys experiments with form. Since I do not have lyric sheets at hand, I can only guess at the words, so my interpretations of some of these songs are probably wrong.
The train-wreck guitars of the opener, The Fox, turn the One Beat-era child-love outtake Lions and Tigers on its head, revealing an animal kingdom of deception and revenge. That duck might be able to shake the water from his feathers now, but once the fox rattles the babe in his teeth, aint nothing that will protect that birdthank God we like the underdog in the US of A, or that duckling would never survive. Either that, or Tuckers been reading too many childrens booksregardless, Im not complaining.
All our little wishes have run dry/Made it to the water, wade it in the lies/[...]Too caught up in our own desires. Wilderness, like Robinsons detective, wants to sort out those whove allowed complacency to lock into American culture, seeing culture war victims, criminals, and sell-outs everywhere.
Both Whats Mine Is Yours and Jumpers seem shaped by Brownsteins brief tenure at UC Berkeleys journalism graduate program, reflecting the loneliness and frustration of physical, intellectual, and cultural displacement. The guitars stutter along nervously in both songs, Whats Mine Is Yours including a fuzzed-out solo from Brownstein and a murky bridge.
Modern Girl is the single most cynical song in Sleater-Kinneys catalog. Brownsteins vocalsno, huffingooze with bitterness, contrasting perfectly with the deceptively sunny but vicious, anti-consumerist lyrics. The protagonist's whole life looks like a sunny day, but only because she thinks she can buy happiness.
Truth is manmade. As for bravery, Sleater-Kinney has never lacked it, and Entertain is one of the bravest songs ever written. Johnny, get your gun. Your culture is lying to you, your government is lying to you, Brownstein is lying to you, rip me open, its so pretty. Where the fuck were you in 1972? Wheres the black and blue? This song is whats bruising, because American culture is cruising for it. This isnt just about reality TV, its about TV dictating reality when, like in Wilderness, the lies behind the facade should be so fucking obvious.
Carnival atmosphere presides in Rollercoaster, where cherry tomatoes, saving the unripe ideas for later, and tilt-a-whirls rule the day. Certainly the poppiest song on the record, it also presides over one of the sharpest tone shifts on record, the last breath of warm breeze before the winter sets in.
The ending sequence on the record creeps up like a fall storm, the final triptych closing off The Woods for imminent destruction. Steep Air slowly grinds in your ear and lap, all while Brownstein whispers the water is bloody with the one who came before. Im tired of knocking on a door that just wont budge, Tucker replies, sounding like she wants to pilot that plane straight into the water.
Lets Call It Love brought me to tears the first time I listened to it, its intense, psychotic instrumentation coalescing into a frantic bridge before briefly touching back to the original melody and swooping into a lengthy jam hypersonic freakout, church bells and all. I wont let you out til Ive had enough! This logically merges with the pensive Night Light, which like One Beats Sympathy focuses on spiritual aspects of natural processes. Visions of woods, to come live in the present and spend all the rest of the sun, closing with a descending guitar line reminiscent of The Swimmer.
The Woods, along with recent releases from Comets On Fire and Wolf Eyes, is the center jewel of the new Sub Pop crown, which after many years of being just another ironic indie rock punch line is finally back as the apex of the most creative, exuberant music being crafted today. And if Sleater-Kinney manages to do what our beloved Welles couldntworking within current industry standards and trends while birthing a piece both accessible and complexthen what once thought impossible will come to pass, and the influence and impact Sleater-Kinney deserves to make will finally, at long last, come screaming all alone through the wilderness, loud and fucking clear.
VIEW 7 of 7 COMMENTS
bobdylan5:
God, I love the way you write! What a perceptive and passionate review! I particularly like the line "This album as a whole forms a injured, shimmering crescendo, before gracefully plummeting from the sky like a dying phoenix, only to set the whole damn forest ablaze." Do you write any fiction? I would love to read some. 
bobdylan5:
Speaking of Sleater-Kinney, I just got done ordering One Beat from Amazon. I've always like them, but never had any of their CDs in my collection. I also ordered the History of Sexuality (2 volumes) by Michel Foucalt. I tried reading Madness and Civilization once but never really got into it. Maybe his insights on sex will pique my interest more. So what instrument do you play?