[review 2005: the honourable mentions]

If you’ve been around a while, and if enough people have bought your records and seen your shows and written about how good a band you are, then you’ll eventually reach a point where the weight of expectation becomes overwhelming. When your next record is no longer simply “awaited” or “anticipated,” but rather prepared for like a religious event, you have two options: change or die. Sleater-Kinney reached that particular summit, had a look around, and decided that for The Woods, they’d have to change. Their hope was that after over a decade of making music, the trio could rediscover what it was they loved so much about composing and playing music. They wanted to remember what it was like when music felt alive, to feel it course through your veins and scare the living daylights out of you with how good it was. So the three women of Sleater-Kinney left Portland for upstate New York, shot a bunch of rifles, forgot how to turn off the distortion pedals, and recorded 10 songs that only remotely resemble anything they’ve done before.

If The Woods is Sleater-Kinney’s answer to “what makes music exciting?”, then it appears exciting equals a lot of distortion and a lot of guitar solos. Far exceeding the restrained experiments sprinkled about every album since Dig Me Out, The Woods is the closest the band has come to recreating their live concerts on record. The difference is that during concerts, the solos and extended outros and fifteen-minute bridges between songs were all improvised and grafted on the spot to the original songs. Here, the solos might be improvised but they’re an integral part of the songs; “What’s Mine Is Yours” is supposed to fall apart halfway through and lurch awkwardly into the bridge. “Let’s Call It Love” is supposed to be eleven minutes as opposed to three. So the one thing that made all the staples of their live show so interesting—their deviation from the regular material—isn’t so interesting anymore, now that it is the regular material. The Woods doesn’t feel any more spontaneous than previous albums, even if occasionally it does feel more alive.

Though let’s not dismiss the more alive part. “The Fox” is a gloriously messy burst of noise that doesn’t let up for most of its three minute running time; it’s the closest Sleater-Kinney have ever come to worshipping at the altar of pure sonic chaos. “Let’s Call It Love” is equally anthemic, the one song where the contained chaos of the entire second half actually works. And the band haven’t lost their ability to pen compelling lyrics, either; “Jumpers” and “Modern Girl” are two of the best character studies the group’s ever written. But there are also more duds on The Woods than on previous albums; “Wilderness” is less interesting than it wants to be, “Steep Air” is actually a bit boring, and “What’s Mine Is Yours” has that excruciating full stop in the middle. Moreover, The Woods never feels like more than the sum of its parts; it sounds like a collection of songs, not an album.

Even if The Woods was a bad album, it was still worth recording because when I saw Sleater-Kinney in Vancouver earlier this year, they actually looked like they were having fun playing the new songs. And the album does have quite a few highlights. But in the end, The Woods sounds like a transition album, merely hinting at what Sleater-Kinney’s new direction might sound like. In other words, how people remember The Woods in the future will depend a lot on what comes after it: will this album represent the point at which Sleater-Kinney began to change, or the point at which Sleater-Kinney began to die?