5 out of 5

Label: Sub Pop

Producer: Dave Fridmann

Dave Fridmann, you mother-junkin’ piece of monkey tripe…!  Ever since Fridmann became the lo-fi multi-instrumental indie it-boy by making gongs sound so deliciously fuzzed out for The Flaming Lips and his name started popping up on a lot of bands old people who just accept recommendations point blank from NPR started oohing and ahing and old-personing over, I tore slips of paper with Fridmann’s name in half and kicked his scuzzily delightful work to the curb, because Clap Your Hands and Say Yeah! have a fucking exclamation point in their name.

This was a roadblock I had to jump over with Jerry Finn, and it took the slap in the face that media can so wonderfully deliver to turn my ear around on that – a reluctant visit home to the folks, escaping into our furnished basement to watch TV, unable to sleep and flipping through channels, pausing on MTV or MTV2 because for freck’s sake were those music videos playing and even then – like a decade ago or whatevs – that was a rarity, and god damn if Sum 41’s “Fat Lip” didn’t come on, to which I totally rolled my eyes but stayed tuned because the album sold like banana bread made out of ingredients which make people buy it feverishly and being a full judgmental music snob and I hadn’t actually heard note one of the band but, come, Jerry Finn, touring with Blink 182, kids with spiked collars and baggy pants, surely this was just pop-punk tripe and I don’t really need to hear it to know that I hate i… what the fuck is this song catchy and it actually doesn’t annoy me.

From then on I saw the merits Finn brought to the table, and I doubt I would’ve given Vendetta Red a chance (a band which I fully dig) if not for having that little about face.

So: Fridmann.  I would have no idea that the bucket of scuzzy fuckin’ rockball that is The Woods was his work.  So credit is obviously due to the band, here, for pushing themselves to allow their clean sound to be so dragged through the mire, but by the same token, I can’t think of another producer who would’ve known how to capture this much space in the sound while allowing the band to still sound like them.  Because despite some sludgy, stoney rockers like the first couple tracks on The Woods, where Corin Tucker’s high-intensity warble somehow hits a new amazing plane of freaked-out-fuck-off energy and Janet Weiss and Corin Tucker slap their instruments into reverby heaven instead of jammin’-jammin’ into every nook and cranny, there are totally some typical S-K sounding tracks on here, that clean guitar line and poppy bass playing around it, tap-a-tap drums energetically rattling around as the vocals ebb and flow up and down.  But whereas previous albums chose a sort of get-in get-out method of sound, everything is left to resonate here, everything is buzzing, so even these more predictable moments find a new and refreshing environment in which to be released, static-soaked, very slight timing mistakes or extra noises tumbling into the mix.  And my lover, sequencing, is fully realized.  Since S-K tend to have two modes – intricate and quick rockers and slowed down pretty track, it’s a natural to toss the pretty track in the middle or at the end of the album, but either way, filling up the rest of the space with that full-on, everything foreground production sound that Johnny Goodmanson used, I get lost on most of their recordings before we get to the conclusion.  We have our pretty track – Modern Girl – here, but not only does Fridmann spin that up to better use (or the band’s combo with his style gave them the motivation to do so, whatever) by setting it on a larger palette, like it was recorded in a huge warehouse and you’re listening in the distance, sparse guitar ringing out, the drums – waiting to come in – echoing and shaking the walls – using the minimalism to great effect instead of it just feeling like a regular S-K track unplugged and slowed down – but his allowing of and adding to the edges in the mix gets rid of the sameness feeling of the surrounding songs, and we even get a 10-minute stoner jam before the album concludes with one last rip-snortin’ track.

This album made year-end lists and it deserved it.  Whether the band’s effort, or the producer’s effort, or the combination of both, The Woods achieves something difficult for a group that’s played together as long as S-K, sounding fresh and, yes, changing their formula but without it sounding like a “and here’s our “raw” album” bid for attention.  This sounded like what it needed to at the time, and is still fully recognizable as Sleater-Kinney (even without Corin’s vocals) despite it being a far cry from the previous album, or any before it.  I’m curious how longtime fans reacted, because seriously, this is not pretty stuff recorded here – it’s not Flaming Lips crooning over a mixed bag of lush noises – it’s a pissed-off chick yelling through static.  But who cares.  We got a great album from a great band, and I wrote a ton of words about it like forty years later.  Moral: me.  Yip yip.