Skip to main contentThe first track on Sleater-Kinney's latest album, The Woods, starts out with the distinctive click and squeal of feedback. Before rock gods like Jimi Hendrix popularized it, that wince-inducing sound signaled a musician losing control of the moment. But around 1970, when rock spilled out of dance halls and into arenas, the screech of feedback became something more, a loud tool that signaled a new sonic edge. That tool helped push rock into a new frontier of heavy psychedelia, where improvisation wasn't just an exercise for a musician but a visceral explosion.
On The Woods' opener, "The Fox," that peal of feedback hangs in the air for a split second. That's before Carrie Brownstein's guitar takes over with a grinding riff, throwing a lasso around the whine and pulling it into what will become a raucous, frightening tale of an ill-conceived romance between a fox and a duck. It's one of those great moments of calculated rock sloppiness that could easily have been left off the album, but that wasn't likely to happen with master-producer Dave Fridmann (Flaming Lips, Mogwai) at the boards. Instead, that sound serves to telegraph the intent of the entire album.
While motive in rock usually involves complicated explanations-especially for a band, like Sleater-Kinney, born out of a political movement-on its newest album, the message is fairly cut-and-dried. This band wants to rip your face off with its music.
"It's just combative," explains drummer Janet Weiss. "It's got a bone to pick. It's fight music. We're not lying down quietly and writing pretty songs. I feel like it's not the time to be doing that, you know. It's not the time for lullabies. It's really a pretty disturbing time in history, and to be passive and quiet is not where we're at."
Where Sleater-Kinney is, it seems, is at a crossroads. Ten years of punk and art-rock experimentation have collided with dense, improvisational guitar solos, heavy distortion and open-throated declarations that push into strikingly new territory. Before Sleater-Kinney may have sounded bold, but on The Woods it is fierce.
Not that the band ever lacked intensity. In many ways, The Woods is simply the seventh powerful album from a Portland trio that, even when it stumbles, is a long way from falling.
Over its decadelong history, Sleater-Kinney has watched its audience evolve as much as its sound. As one fan described the change on a message board last month, it's "now mostly short, 15-year-old girls who are not angry at the establishment, but more worried about what the band is wearing." Lead singer Corin Tucker and Weiss strongly disagree with this opinion, hearing its negative implications and ignoring its beauty: that 15-year-old girls are listening to heavy psychedelic, political rock.
The group that started out as a late-era riot-grrrl act from Olympia, Wash., has made some seismic sound shifts since releasing a self-titled debut in 1995. As part of the riot-grrrl movement that employed music to push a pro-girl agenda, Sleater-Kinney found a small but devout following of fans who hung on Tucker's every caterwaul and reveled in the band's politics. For three years Brownstein and Tucker built a fanbase for their unrefined punk, one basement show at a time. But the band didn't have a permanent drummer until after the release of Call the Doctor in 1996, when Tucker and Brownstein adopted Portland drummer Janet Weiss and the Sleater-Kinney sound started to solidify. With Weiss keeping a rock-steady beat, Tucker and Brownstein were able to develop their signature guitar duets, each wrapping spare notes around the other's, with Tucker's primal yowl serving as shrill punctuation to songs filled with political angst.
By the time the riot grrrl movement started to fade, Sleater-Kinney had already pushed its sound beyond gender politics, earning an audience of indie-rock fans who didn't care about the messages of grrrl pioneers like Bikini Kill and Bratmobile. That move to rock's middle ground, along with a leap in 1997 from minuscule Chainsaw Records to the larger indie label Kill Rock Stars, infuriated some of the band's original fans.
"We had like this crazy, queer, freaky fan base that were like, 'Oh, they totally sold out,'" Tucker says. "Kill Rock Stars? Come on! You know, there's just no interest for us in being totally helpless, starving artists that don't have any kind of business sense whatever."
After 2002's One Beat, the band's fourth album on Kill Rock Stars, it was time for another big change. By then, all three band members were living in Portland. Tucker, now 32, was married and the mother of a son-with the rock-god moniker of Marshall Tucker Bangs-and Weiss, 39, and Brownstein, 30, had also taken on real-life responsibilities, like station wagons and mortgages. They sought a label that could do more of the heavy lifting of marketing and distribution, and so signed with Seattle-based Sub Pop, one of the country's most successful independent labels. But what Sub Pop picked up wasn't just another bunch of aging indie rockers. They had signed a band that was restless.
"We knew they were very interested in challenging themselves and getting out of their comfort zone," says Tony Kiewel, the Sub Pop A&R guy who inked the Sleater-Kinney deal. "And I guess that should have implied a more aggressive-sounding record, but I certainly didn't think that. When I got the album, I wasn't necessarily pleasantly surprised but surprised, like it took a minute for the pleasantness to settle in. Like 'What the hell is this?'"
One Beat had earned the hyperbolic praise of music critics-Greil Marcus dubbed Sleater-Kinney the best rock band in the world, not only for that album's fiery politics but for its musical promise. The Woods, while not as political as One Beat, delivers on that promise.
Unlike their post-riot-grrrl counterparts Le Tigre, Sleater-Kinney is no longer just a band by, for and about women. In its new songs, the band's sound is as complicated as its lyrics, with gender just another part of the S-K persona. That's in contrast to Le Tigre lead singer Kathleen Hanna, formerly of Bikini Kill, who helped pen the Riot Grrl Manifesto back in 1990. "This society hates women and I don't," the manifesto reads. "This society doesn't want us girls to feel happy or powerful in any way. Being a sexy and powerful female is one of the most subversive projects of all." Le Tigre might still be preaching this gender doctrine on its latest album, This Island, but with The Woods, Sleater-Kinney is living it. The group has become a powerful and confident rock band that just happens to be entirely female.
"It's frustrating that people can't have a more multidimensional look at who we are as people," Tucker says. "It often comes down to, like, 'You're three women onstage.' Well, actually we're three well-accomplished musicians. We're artists. We're opinionated. We're all these different things, ya know. And we are women."
And they're convincing live performers, as Portlanders can witness at two shows this week at the Crystal Ballroom. That stage might seem a little small to the band after opening for Pearl Jam on a 2003 North American tour. That experience, which put the band in huge arenas playing to thousands, was another catalyst for change-in the way the band heard its own music.
"It sounded really different in these huge arenas," Tucker says, "just to have this kinda crazy sonic psychedelic reverberation happening. I think that's a part of where this record came from.... But that's also a lot of what Dave Fridmann does to records."
Fridmann started working with the band after Weiss heard him speak at Portland's 2003 TapeOp Conference. The band was seeking a new producer who could help them commit that sound to tape, and Weiss liked Fridmann's raw approach. But Fridmann was valuable for more than just his aesthetic vision.
"He wasn't that big of a fan of our music when we first approached him," Tucker says. "In some ways, we needed some sort of outside opinion in order to push us and challenge us and critique us a bit. I think we sorta knew that would be a good thing for us. But it was hard."
Fridmann's production is noticeable but not overbearing. By pushing the noise ceiling up on The Woods, he has allowed Sleater-Kinney to exercise its new complexities. After "The Fox" pits Tucker's bloodcurdling yowl in a decibel match against Brownstein's Gibson SG, "Wilderness" introduces an even heavier sound. Sure, there are still Tucker and Brownstein's intricately woven guitar lines, but here that sound is filled out by a bass line and-previously off-limits for this group-a guitar solo. Listeners better get used to it, because the next track, a beat-heavy scorcher called "What's Mine Is Yours" opens the floor to Brownstein, who commits a minute-and-a-half-long improvisational clash, an unexpected, hair-raising noise solo.
The rest of the album follows in kind, hardened by the band's familiar flashes of anger, heard best on Brownstein's incendiary indictment of nostalgia, "Entertain." Then the venom's tempered with sly sassiness on "Modern Girl," a distortion-filled ballad that casts Tucker as a disenchanted vamp. Most striking of all is the 11-minute, improv-laden "Let's Call It Love," which clearly states that this band isn't just experimenting with being a rock band; Sleater-Kinney is a rock band, even if Tucker claims that tag is too simple. Maybe too dumb.
"I don't think it's a straight rock album at all," she says. "Have you listened to our lyrics? I mean, come on."
"Well, she's crazy," Weiss counters. "I mean, all our records are rock albums."
WWeek 2015