Who's to Say I Don't Have Wings?

#1: Sleater-Kinney - The Woods. Well, this probably wasn't much of a surprise. In truth, it wasn't even close.

Musicians reinventing themselves is nothing new--witness U2's sea change from Rattle & Hum to Achtung Baby--and is actually something that they should do in order to keep from stagnating. Sleater-Kinney has been slowly modifying their sound over the course of their entire career, and in retrospect where they ended up sonically on The Woods makes perfect sense given that gradual evolution. But it's a rare thing for a band to make the previous 10 years of their career seem like just a warm-up, and S-K does just that with the very first note.

The reason the album is such a shift is because the band embraced distortion, volume and a smattering of influences from other sources: the shift to overdrive in "Rollercoaster" is worthy of the Stooges, the solo in "What's Mine is Yours" is pure Hendrix, the keyboards in "Jumpers" could be It's Hard-era Townsend. But there's a difference between absorbing influences and being absorbed by them, and that's a crucial distinction. The band may make nods to Hendrix, The Who and Zeppelin, but it isn't aping them--none of what you hear sounds like anything other than Sleater-Kinney.

Producer Dave Fridmann has received quite a lot of notice for his work, and what he has accomplished highlights how production can fundamentally alter an album (see: Brian Eno). The band has always employed some levels of dissonance on their albums, but the production had been relatively "clean." Not only is the sound louder here, but it's distorted even when it doesn't need to be, and there are more effects layered than I ever recall hearing before.

None of which takes anything away from the band itself, who purposefully took themselves out of their own environment (the album was recorded in upstate New York, a coast away from Portland) and their own comfort zone. According to interviews they've given after the album's release, the recording process was almost enough for the trio to call it quits. But what they managed to create as a result of that stress and effort is, to my ears, probably the high-water mark of their career.

They may never make its like again.