Sleater Kinney Entered The Woods, And Came Out A Different- And Better- Group
In Their Blistering Tirade Against The Gate Keepers Of Sonic Realism The Post Grunge Group Made The Best Rock Album Of A Generation
Tristan Young @talltristan
“I remember thinking in the studio that I’d really love to make some of our fans kind of angry”. Those were the words of Carrie Brownstein, recalling the development of Sleater Kinney’s 2005 album The Woods. Such an audacious and potentially self-destructive statement may seem foreboding and reckless. Maybe it was. But she and fellow band mates Corin Tucker and Janet Weiss felt it to be a vital pathway to explore in developing their 7th studio album. Formed in Olympia, Washington in 1994, Sleater Kinney had gone from obscure and as of yet quantified new comers in the waning days of the Pacific Northwest grunge epoch, to indie rock darlings in the vein of Riot Grrrl. Later in their career and with the release of their seminal 1997 album Dig Me Out Sleater Kinney seemed poised on the precipice of a kind of informal induction into canonized rock and roll discourse. Their bristling intensity and colourful third wave feminist charisma had elevated them beyond insurgent post punk interlopers and into the more mainstream taxonomy of rock and roll. By traditional metrics and parameters this is what you qualify as a success story. The group was not happy.
As their ascendance through the ranks of modern rock and roll became more assured, so to did critiques that the doldrums of record label bureaucracy and drudgery had tempered their searing and vibrant urgency. With subsequent releases, fans and critics alike wondered if creative entropy was encroaching on their sound, and as a result the group was sounding more and more polished, glossy, produced. Had the group traded their authenticity and realness for the codified and antiseptic purview of label managers and their pedantic production agendas? Such a question, weather fairly levelled at SK or not, raised larger inquires about the origin of such concerns and what it said about the pop culture milieu that had surrounded and largely subsumed rock and roll as a distinct genre. Who gets to define what is authentic, what is genuine, what sounds hackneyed or what sounds real? Is such an abstract notion even something that can be rendered in measurable terms, criteria in which to subscribe to?
It was not so much seeking an answer to, but interrogating the question itself that would motivate SK’s next project. It’s also, perhaps ironically the project that truly enshrined the group within the rock pantheon, even as it derides such institutions, lamenting their dogmatic canonization of rock music and thusly reducing it along another vector in which to be branded, marketed, and consumed. The alleged realness of rock and roll had been inverted by those that would proselytize its efficacy into a simulacrum of itself to distract us all from what is truly real; because what’s truly real is horrible. If this sounds like a rhetorical ouroboros of circular logic or at least observation, then that highlights the intrinsically unknowable qualities of such a pursuit, and why it was folly to arrogantly think the matter could be settled definitively. Thusly as the group moved beyond their own musical comfort zone they endeavoured to exhume the meaning behind the question to a remarkable degree and depth, knowing full well the truest answer they could find would be no answer at all. They surmised there would be virtue in getting lost in the wilderness of the query, tangled up in the thicket of where authenticity and commercialization intertwine, with no clear way out. Sleater Kinney had entered The Woods.
To navigate this inscrutable terrain and project some kind of message from beyond these intellectual hinterlands, SK had to cut through decades of cultural and rock propaganda & gospel. To achieve this they made drastic alterations to their production process. Moving from long time record label Kill Rock Stars over to Sub Pop allowed them to reboot and re-envision how they recorded their songs. This was also supported by working with producer David Fridman, known for his talents on sculpting the psychedelic flare of the Flaming Lips in their studio albums. He encouraged them to approach studio sessions as live sets. Aside from some vocals and rhythm sections, much of The Woods was recorded live in studio rather than being stitched together in post. The tracks Let’s Call It Love and Night Light are sequenced back to back on the album because they were recorded in tandem in one take. Fridman encouraged them to sound more spontaneous, less rehearsed. Unhinged, even. They had to shake loose the foundational consensus of how rock fits into pop culture zeitgeist. They had to break through the noise by being even louder. Much fucking louder.
Of course they would also need a way to articulate the paradox of searching for a way to define the truest sense of sonic realism, knowing that the more finite your assessment of the idea, the more prescriptive and therefore disingenuous your assertions become. Within these contexts and constraints the issue is difficult to address directly, so SK cultivates an atmosphere of unknowing and obfuscation throughout the record. Sonically they contribute to this via aggressively acute waves of distortion and rhythmic serration, but their language is also mired in layers of cryptic anxiety. Amidst the kinetic fury of Roller Coaster Brownstein sings “I’m dizzy, I’m faithless/ where is the ground”; she continues, “vertigo is my only clue”. It’s a metaphor not only for our disorientation and growing inability to make ontological observations about the world, but a sickening feeling that something is wrong that can only be sensed in the abstract. In the rollicking and manically beat oriented What’s Mine Is Yours Tucker and Brownstein assert, “said the teacher in the classroom that there’s something wrong”, an allusion to how both the powers that be in an a musical but also culturally institutional level are failing at self actualization, and therefore are ill equipped to define any modern parameters of authenticity in music, a deficiency we all share to an extent. These concerns intensify into shrieking outbursts, “Your rules are all wrong and it’s either run or fight/ but I’m still running”. The sentiment is that we still lack the procedural language to process this inadequacy so all we can do is attempt to escape the problem or be awkwardly combative towards its implications. By running, SK enforces the metaphor of being lost in the woods, the only place a solution may exist but where it is also naturally concealed; or perhaps unnaturally as the album art- a series of red wood trees confined within the barriers of a stage and a red curtain- would suggest.
This frustrated ennui only dances along the periphery of issues SK seeks to understand. To drill deeper they eject literal examination, constrained by its pre-textual linkage to easily marketable ideas of authenticity and instead go for explicitly allegorical in the fiendishly abrasive album opener The Fox. Amidst feedback severe enough to be something akin to a detonation, it can be hard to tell exactly what the group is getting at with their prosaic and oblique story of a fox and a duck. In the story, using deceptively plaintive language, the fox guides a lost and errant duck to land and teaches it about the world. But once we understand that the fox is a manipulator, not to be trusted about its epistemological interpretations of the world, we can see the connection to abusive and coercive relationship between capitalist and cultural figure heads with the rest of society; or perhaps between record labels and artists. The fox exclaims, “Land ho!” as if providence for the duck is at hand, followed by the duck asking, “Oh fox, what is love? Can you tell me? Is this love?” Land is supplanted for love, implying a connection between the two. Land symbolizes what’s real, but becomes entwined with love, something far more subjective and prone to manipulative intonations.
From this perspective our understanding of what reality and authenticity is becomes subject to authorship by manipulative, even predatory actors within our life. The duck realizes this malignant dependency on its part and walks away from the arbiters of such things with SK blaring, “there’s no looking back”. The visceral sonic feedback that accompanies this fairy tale is no mistake, for it intimates the journey our plucky feathered friend is about to take is going to be a brutal experience. The Fox is perforated with a cascading wall of distorted sound, ready to break through the barriers in its way. Far beyond the glass ceilings that their stridently effective feminist inclinations had already shattered in previous albums, this time Sleater-Kinney would need to move mountains.
It feels like that quite often listening to The Woods. There are near exhausting levels of brutalist chaos embedded in the screeching, incisive guitars. It’s unrelentingly fierce but also joyously melodic, even playful. This should seem inexorably dichotomous but it’s surprising how well these competing ideas work in tandem. Entertain curdles with piercing squelches but the guitar notation is so fluid and excitable that the cacophony becomes complimentary. Messy waves of fuzz build up over the streamlined rhythm of Roller Coaster, but rather than blunt that inertia it actually gains momentum. The metallic and industrial churns sound like the marching of the heaviest orders of warfare in The Fox, but the melody, rather than become mired in the sonic trenches, prances along an elevated pathway with each strike.
There’s also a resoundingly galvanizing defiance pulsing through so many of the melodies. The iterations of repeating guitar spirals in Wilderness could form the backbone of any protest, the more theatrical the better. The primal, electrifying fury of the guitars during the climax of Jumpers is so saliently intense you can almost sense the instrumentation breaking free of the melodic pathways, reaching escape velocity. Steep Air’s mid sequence evokes the violent death throes of a celestial body collapsing under the weight of its own detrimental gravity, coiled into an unsustainable pressure cooker that explodes, unpredictably spewing sonic detritus into dazzling patterns. The crescendos of Let’s Call It Love, of which there are a panoply of over the 11 minute run time reach near hysterical levels of kinetic fever, rendering a densely robust melodic framework almost fragile amidst its shattering pulses.
Even within this scabrous gauntlet of sound and noise, Brownstein and Tucker play homage to classical guitar in the vein of traditional rock, blues, and even more ambient iterations. The frolicking opening notes of Wilderness recalls the Rolling Stones at their most optimistic, and the bucolic pleasantries hidden amid the distortion of Modern Girl is acutely evocative of daisy age folk. Elaborate blues riffs in Steep Air are maudlin in their refrain but speed up with much more gymnastic finesse making for an exciting pairing. What’s Mine Is Yours is the fruition of a hypothetical pairing of UK punk and the parochial grunge of the Pacific Northwest that somehow never quite came to fruition on a macro scale, and it’s awesome. Roller Coaster has classic up tempo blues fret builds to start but morphs into a wave of analogue distortion, proving SK to be masters of symbiosis and synthesis. The naturalistic manner in their transitions implies a confident inevitably even though outside their own studio sessions this is far from assured.
It’s these transitions and combinations forming a broader gestalt of just what the guitar can do that gives The Woods an incomparable and brilliantly textured depth. Duelling guitar rhythms chase each other for primacy in Jumpers like some kind of a death race, which is all too appropriate considering its fatalistic subject matter. The echoing reverb in What’s Mine Is Yours compliments a rhythmic breakdown and it stridently dimensional. Yet after it’s dissolved into barely recognizable constituent parts the melody slowly struts back in the most nonchalant of manners, as if the craziest drug trip of your life was actually no big deal. Then it just recalibrates and reignites, drawing upon an impossibly sustained energy that triumphs with one more exclamatory hook. The wild swings in Entertain might seem stitched together on paper but each seemingly disparate sequence is executed with perfect coherence and fidelity. There’s a remarkable balance of blunt acuity but also plummeting and nuanced depths to be excavated. It ebbs and flows like the most expertly sequenced Hollywood blockbuster, although its calamitous drop at the end, with notes almost splitting apart, could put even most of those films to shame. Let’s Call It Love is perpetually on the verge of disintegrating under its own fractious energy and yet the rhythm insists on getting more audaciously complex and celebratory despite the fact it has to keep this up for over 10 minutes. It’s thrilling.
The Woods, from an instrumental perspective truly cements its place in history with its incendiary and dramatic solos, each one uniquely and assiduously rendered. While strictly speaking more of an opening salvo than a bridge, the sundering vibrancy of the beginning of The Fox is nerve wracking but in an oddly compelling way. The overarching crescendos in Wilderness, with excessively theatrical and manicured contours, are brilliantly juxtaposed by the sonic adventurism of its solo. A sharp downward sift in the exuberant guitar notes transforms into a brilliant homage to Hendrix style exploratory instrumental musings. The punchy alt punk hooks of What’s Mine Is Yours slow down to twist and contort with laborious girth, extracting every granular detail from the instrument it can command. To hell with rhythm at this point, this is pure sensation, an earnest and genuine search for through lines between the past and present of how rock and roll sounds. The solo bridge in Jumpers is distilled, invective fury. Blistering, outraged, it’s disarmingly aggressive, hypnotic in its incisive purity, an inexplicably compelling demonstration of how hostility can be purposed in the right way. Elsewhere in Entertain the mixture of distortion and ostensibly improvisational power chords almost serendipitously stumble into the perfect sequence. The beauty is they never make it sound easy, certainly not in Let’s Call It Love, with its echoing swells, chugging clicks, spaced out chords, and overall tenacity that just won’t dissipate.
For all of the discussion on the album’s contribution to guitar, it would be remiss not to detail what a spectacle of percussion The Woods is. Janet Weiss’ drumming is consistently impressive and quite often show stealing. The way the snares race along with the accelerating vocals in Let’s Call It Love is breathtaking in just about the literal sense of the word. Jumpers delves into claustrophobic territory with Weiss’ marauding punishment of high hats and fills. The production design ensures it hammers you in from all sides, manoeuvring faster than your own observations can perceive, constantly boxing you in. The galloping and hoping march of the toms and snares in Entertain are riotous, articulating how much personality can be extracted from percussion. Even more striking is how the pursuant drums briefly overtake the guitar in Roller Coaster, themselves becoming the melodic spine of the track’s bridge. Rather than simply directing the tempo of tracks the percussion throughout The Woods adds just as much personality and complexity as the rest of the instrumentation.
It’s this complexity and melodic salience that helps prove SK’s point: that you can’t say it, you have to show it. That’s the fallacy of entertainment, all of the artists that explicitly tell you how real they are while the reality around them suggests otherwise. Such is the inspiration of the cover, the naturalistic and immutable beauty of nature, subsumed and corrupted by man made forms of entertainment and therefore commerce. Yet it is these purveyors of such commerce that are often in a position to adjudicate notions of authenticity. This is hypocritical at best and ruinous to our mental health on a societal scale at worst. These ideas are explored further in, of course, the track Entertain. In a blunt response to those who decried SK as getting too luxuriated or produced they warn, “we’re not here cause we want to entertain”. The group goes onto assail how formally understood concepts of authenticity or relevant past cultural markers have been repurposed for shallow and cynical pursuits. “You come around looking 1984, you’re such a bore, 1984/ nostalgia you’re using it like a whore”. At one point they bemoan, “reality is the new fiction they say”, while the idea of who they actually denotes does a lot of heavy lifting. Vitally, they continue with, “join the rank and file, on your TV dial”. Here they articulate how consumer media has become a mendacious pathway to things like manipulative patriotism or proto-nationalism, as suggested by the specific language in the lyrics. It becomes something of a perverse inversion of the themes they are exploring; how something as facile as television becomes the key vector for understanding reality. How what’s real uses what’s fake as a weaponized shroud. With this SK suggests that this ever quixotic search for realness has become polluted by commercialization and capitalism. It’s important to note that claims of moral virtuousness in this regard are axiomatically not to be trusted as they can only be disseminated through these very same mediums. “They are lying and I am lying too”, becomes perhaps the most instructive passage in the song.
These sentiments are discussed through the angle of feminism in impressively witty and humorous style in the come down centerpiece Modern Girl. What seems to be the most pastoral and cathartic song in the album is also the most deceptive, a testament to their talents for subliminal sarcasm. Over dreamy folk hooks that accommodate a mixture of hazy fuzz and messy harmonica better than you’d think, Tucker and Brownstein wax on lovingly about the fulfilment brought about by love but also by material things. Lullaby and dreamy chords radiate wholesome contentment, but the song is anything but. The phrase, “happiness makes me a modern girl”, seems pleasant enough if a bit obtuse, but things take a subtly darker turn with, “took my money and bought a TV/ TV brings me closer to the world”. As the roaring triumph of such statements is subsumed and walled off by more dissonant and scraping detritus we see how these sentiments are actually fading within the facsimile of truth and happiness, its unscrupulous attributes breaking down in real time.
In Modern Girl the unfulfilling and hollow pursuits of capitalism short-circuit our understanding of modernity, especially from a feminist perspective. Happiness becomes anger, spending money becomes a source of frustration, “I took my money, I couldn’t buy nothing/ I’m so sick of this brave new world”, they lament in a brilliant allusion to the dystopian connotations that come with such a realization; that being how we use superficial metrics to be connected to the world. The song explores the challenging intersections of how late stage feminism was subsumed by normalized consumerism; how feminism became a brand to be commoditized, diminishing the intrinsic normative value of its original intent. Once those two dissonant threads are entangled they are nearly impossible to detach form each other. Thusly the modern age of feminism becomes defined by what a women a can buy for herself instead of accomplish for herself, subliminally reinforcing hetero-normative and patriarchal foundations of consumer capitalism. “Happiness makes me a modern girl”, becomes a cynical invocation of the hollowing out of the once proudly audacious feminist agenda, now covertly consigned to the exigencies of market capitalism. Self-actualization became far too tied to something so tangible but also paradoxically fleeting. In other words, “Took my money and bought a donut/ the hole’s the size of the entire world”.
With our capacity for self–identification so malnourished, so too will our perceptions of authenticity be corrupted, because we can’t find it in ourselves. It’s because of this that SK pursues the idea of what realness is and isn’t through so many angles and lenses. That sense of unknowing and vertigo in What’s Mine Is Yours and Roller Coaster or the farm animal parable in The Fox is animated by this conceit. Wilderness is an interesting deconstruction of popular Americana and zeitgeist that informs much of the writing in rock and roll or classic American literature. The freedom of the road trip through the heartland; that perfect idea of a post war American town. All of it is dismantled and disabused of the idea of the American dream being a wellspring of inspiration for classic rock cannon- “All our little wishes have run dry, made it in the water, waded in the lies”. In reality it is the exact inverse of what has been canonized. “The winters are gray, now so are their dreams”, they sing in recounting a married couple picking up their lives and starting fresh. “Everything’s white, now so are smiles”, serves as a direct condemnation of what was racially associated with the idea of Americana; SK frames it instead- rightly so mind you- as regretful white washing. With spirited guitar chords sarcastically alluding to classic rock riffs, we have lines like, “It’s a family feud, the red and the blue… It’s truth against truth”, which sounds like a much more forlorn but accurate rendering of the real America.
In searching for something fundamentally, frustratingly unknowable, The Woods astutely spends part of its time dealing in abstractions. If the dark matter of a negative space cannot be rendered or illuminated, drawing inferences from its peripheries can be instructive. Steep Air, awash in a equally acerbic instrumental and vocal tones laments the adjudicating influence given to the gate keepers of rock and roll in regards to what constitutes the defining and evolving markers of the genre. In other words, if we cannot determine the nature of authenticity in music, we can at least argue who is not qualified to make such assertions. It cannot be veterans of the industry that chart out rock’s future or fidelity, for they are too sermonized in hagiography to navigate the discourse earnestly or successfully. Much like their admission of being in on the lie in Entertain, SK confesses they too are constrained by the dogmatic nostalgia of rock’s bygone eras, “I booked my ticket, packed my bags, flight is leaving, our time has passed”. This passage is rendered in macabre insinuations; as the track transitions from maudlin blues notes to wildly free wheeling and jagged guitar hooks we hear, “but who’s to say I don’t have wings”- a valediction that references the suicidal gravity of Jumpers from earlier in the album.
Album closer Night Light continues these conceits and pairs them with the allegorical nature of The Fox. While evidently the quietest track on the album, it is also the most stridently rueful, giving it a jarringly sobering presence. The metaphor of a shining light cutting through the blighted darkness serves as a double entendre, dove tailing the tangential themes of authenticity in music and coping with the debilitating nature of what truly is real. “I hate to be led, so give me a spark I can look for instead”, Tucker pleads. The desperation for guidance becomes more overt as she and Brownstein scream, “How do you do it? This bitter and bloody world/ keep it together and shine for your family?” In one final exasperated gasp they wonder, “How do you do it with visions of worst to come? Live in the present and spin of the rays of the sun?” In our current era of eco fatalism and epistemological fissures that have ripped impassable schisms through pretty much all discourse, this singularly foreboding assessment of turn of the century existentialism is darkly prophetic. Yet that light remains their inspiration not only for creative adventurism, but also the only source of nourishment and hope in an increasingly hostile world. The faintest suggestion that there is a correlation between the two ideas is, understandably, the closest thing SK gets to an answer of their central question.
The salience of The Woods comes from every time they approach the precipice of discovery it becomes shaped through suffering rather than epiphany. It would be naïve to assume that a conclusive journey in search of authenticity would yield anything other than pernicious results- just look at the world in which we occupy. This is the central point in the remarkably poetic and brutal centerpiece of the album, Jumpers. Far removed from even the perfunctory semblance of a brash and excitable rock and roll experience, Jumpers is a devastating rumination on the effects of mental instability, anxiety, guilt, and the terrifying decisions such things lead us to. In a bristling alchemy of dramatic lyricism and nihilistic finality, SK recounts the story of a young person compelled to suicide. The passages are so resolutely poignant that even the repurposing of the classic Mark Twain line, “the coldest winter that I ever saw was the summer that I spent”, as vivid an inclusion as that is, doesn’t register as the highest point. Rather it’s the mournful and dreary existence seemingly designed at a molecular level to guide a person to their own demise, “the only substance is the fog and it hides all that has gone wrong, can’t see a thing inside the maze”. Here the central metaphor of The Woods is intensified and extended into the debilitating miasma of mental instability that precipitates suicidal inclinations. For such brutal subject matter, Jumpers carries an almost angelic elegance to its writing, suggesting the a strange and perverse comfort in the actions being considered, “there is a bridge adorned in fame, the golden spine of engineering, who’s back is heavy with my weight”. The wording is carefully chosen here; the malignant delusion at the heart of suicide is that you are a burden on your friends and on society, that you would be heroically helping them by ending it. Taking the burden off of them in other words. After a prodigious and unhinged solo a forlorn and resigned cadence sets in, one simmering with regret and agony. The final lines of the song should be considered in their totality as a tormenting synthesises of gorgeously poetic fatalism and frighteningly direct literalism:
“My falling shape will draw a line between the blue of sea and sky, I’m not a bird I’m not a plane. I took a taxi to the gate I will not go to school again, four seconds was the longest wait”.
Those final words dissolve under the fragility of their own exhaustion, however their repetitions build with righteous and sustained fury. In having to articulate the exquisite trauma and mourning that permeates this microcosm of a morality play, Tucker and Brownstein seem incensed that any of this needs to be said at all.
That fury manifests in dynamic and explicitly voluminous vocal performances throughout The Woods. With a consistency that seems unsustainable, even indescribable at times, Tucker and Brownstein push their vocal chords to their limits, with incendiary results. The only thing more omnivorously intimidating than the guitar might just be them. You can often sense and feel the sound waves rippling through their affixed medium, rupturing the space-time of the matrices around it. The near feral climax of Wilderness or sustained howling zeniths of What’s Mine Is Yours are vibrant, but it’s the rattling oscillations of The Fox that truly amaze. The elongated and pulsating enunciations of the vowels in phrases like, “can you tell me, what is love,” are transfixing, much like the cataclysmic celebratory chants towards the end of the album, “let’s call it love”, screamed with deleterious zeal. The final vengeful and apocalyptic paroxysms of Jumpers are acidic and accusatory, matched by the synchronized and disruptive oration of its hypnotically soaring chorus. This album channels anger and dread into something galvanizing, but maybe uncontrollable; complete chaos, the melodic breakdown of the entire album seems perilously foreshadowed with each vocal outburst, like revving an engine far past the red line, and then doing it over and over again. When Tucker hysterically wails, “the grip of fear, it’s already here”, in Entertain, she sounds afraid of even herself.
Fear follows in the torrential wake of The Wood’s ecstatic bombast. It stalks the lyrics and subtly invades the opulence of the spamsic instrumentation, just ever so slightly. It creeps up from atypical and unseen channels, colouring the tonality and topics of the album with an air of dread. It manifests in a sense of unknowing, of loss, of death, of cynicism, all things that sadly are at the heart of authenticity in music. That fear that slowly surrounds us is also maybe exactly what Sleater Kinney was searching for in a tautological sense. Authenticity is not something you achieve, but something that finds you. When it does the results are violent and unpredictable, anathematized from any semblance of being marketed or profited from in the long run. This may seem dispiriting, but spend enough time out in the unknowns of sonic exploration as they did and that acceptance becomes acclimatization, which in turn reveals previously untapped potential. What comes from it may be intimidatingly fierce to the point of alienation, but that’s sort of the beauty of the fresh start that The Woods was. To the fans that may have felt left behind or aggrieved by the album, itching to give Sleater Kinney a piece of their mind over it, Tucker embeds towards the end of Wilderness a nuanced and thoughtfully considered rejoinder fitting of the album’s overall aesthetic: “I’ll see you in hell”.