For little girls, the woods can be a frightening and dangerous place. Big, band wolves eat grandmothers, witches seek to steal youth and beauty and poison apples offer endless sleep. Traditionally, were you a girl, you’d want to avoid the woods so as to remain in the blissful and unblooded state of childish innocence.
But Sleater-Kinney has never been afraid of the unknown. The band enters into The Woods, its seventh album, with axes drawn, well prepared to meet the various demons that lurk there. And unlike so many fairy tale protagonists, guitarists Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein and drummer Janet Weiss emerge victorious from the darkness with the forbidden knowledge and their selves intact.
Like the early blueswomen and R&B singers who helped birth rock ’n’ roll, the hallmark of Sleater-Kinney’s music is desire. The Woods strains forward, always reaching its long, curling guitar lines forward, but never quite managing to reach the target. Tucker’s existential wail and Brownstein’s yips and piercing trills sound perpetually unfulfilled: on “Rollercoaster,” Tucker sings, “Red cherry tomato/Down at the Market pick out the ripe one/Tempting me sorely and I want to bite one/Wait, wait save it for later.”
Musically, the crisp, clean lines that defined records like The Hot Rock and Dig Me Out are supplanted by menacing walls of fuzz and the reverberating boom of drums. This may be due in part to the influence of new producer Dave Fridmann (Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev), who appears to have let a layer of dense moss grow in the studio during recording. At time, the sound borders on the psychedelic—the 11-minute “Let’s Call It Love” should be listened to under a black light. “The Fox” erupts in a menacing burst of noise that looms over the listener like a dark sky.
The most amazing thing about Sleater-Kinney is that they don’t seem the least bit intimidated by the brooding figures in The Woods, nor are they frightened by what the dark environment does to their psyche. Instead, they turn an unflinching stare on the ogre, woodsman and the prince and set them running.
