This came out in 2005 — or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):
“We’re not here ’cause we want to entertain,” yowls Sleater-Kinney’s Corin Tucker — to the surprise of no one, I suspect. Well, no one who’s been paying attention, anyway.
Singer-guitarist Tucker and her sisters in this prickly Portland punk trio have never made a habit of sweetening their sound or dumbing down their lyrics for mass consumption. But their seventh album The Woods may be their darkest and most uncompromising disc yet. Not to mention their flat-out loudest, noisiest and heaviest.
This 48-minute set is nothing short of ferocious, with track after track constructed from a wall of pounding drums, blistering guitars and Tucker’s ear-splitting warble — which is fairly surprising, considering Flaming Lips / Mercury Rev producer David Fridmann was behind the board for these 10 songs. Fridmann does get to stretch his psychedelic muscles here and there, adding background textures to a few tracks and turning one guitar solo passage into a striking soundscape. But for the most part he stays out of the way as Tucker, guitarist Carrie Brownstein and drummer Janet Weiss crank up, rock out and move some serious air with powerhouse workouts like Rollercoaster, The Fox and the 11-minute noise-rock catharsis Let’s Call it Love.
It’s definitely not entertainment in the lowest-common-denominator sense — but if The Woods doesn’t rock your world and make you look at Sleater-Kinney in a new light, I suspect you can’t see the forest for the trees.
