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Sleater-Kinney.
 Corin Tucker has good reason to be excited about 'The Woods', the seventh album for her band Sleater-Kinney. For most of the last ten years they have been a strident, spikily melodic three piece who have carved out a distinctive, angular punk rock sound. 'The Woods' is a great leap forward for the group, who have never been afraid to experiment with their two guitar and drum format, and the album is more rock than ever.
Sleater-Kinney were a bloody intense and electrifying live act when I saw them two nights in a row back in 2001, and with all the information suggesting they have pushed their live shows even further, it's heartening to hear that they've been talking to the Big Day Out (literally, since the band collectively manage themselves) and are keen to come out for it in January next year. Their first Australian tour still holds fond memories: Tucker regales me with memories of playing in Adelaide and playing the Producers (now the East End Exchange), borrowing gear and staying upstairs. Things have changed since, mind: the three fiercely independent original riot grrls completed a stadium tour with Pearl Jam in 2003, an experience which inspired much of the new material. The resulting album is a whole far greater than the sum of its three parts (guitarist Carrie Brownstein, drummer Janet Weiss and Tucker on vocals and guitar), and Tucker is clearly proud of the result.
"Having the experience of playing live in the larger arenas gave us a different perspective on our sound and gave us opportunity to experiment with it a bit more," she explains. "I am also playing parts which are more for a bass, or playing more rhythm [guitar] than ever before, so I think that adds to that dimension. We have always tuned down to C# but now we have also have many, many effects," she giggles, "so there is a lot going on."
She's got that right. Her sometimes shrill, sometimes operatic, always arresting vocal cuts through fuzzed-out rifffage on What's Mine Is Yours, before returning to nice-as-pie harmonies on Jumpers that shifts gear into driving, screaming rock. "We worked with Dave Fridman," Tucker explains, adding that the Low, Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev producer said he didn't like much of their previous work. "He wanted to do everything as live as possible which was surprising to us because the Flaming Lips was so layered. But he heard these songs and he really wanted to do it live. Wewent into the studio and played everything over and over again, and he made notes and stared at us and made us really nervous. But we did a few modifications to arrangements, or some things he suggested to make the songs better. And then we just set up the guitar sounds for each song and really worked on it to get the take that we wanted."
That includes a long improvised section between the last two songs, a droning, swirling pseudo-psychedelic rock bridge. "That was our big goal, to be able to pull that off [live] and we totally did it!" says Tucker excitedly.
Fans can breathe easy, though: Sleater-Kinney have not lost their radical, critical edge, either. Dominant pop culture is critiqued through the oh-so sweet sounding Modern Girl and Entertain.
"I think this record is more subtle in content. [Previous album] 'One Beat' was much more in-your-face political, protest songs. But this is more personal, more storytelling, and more with that trying to look at things from our own experience of living in this country. We just thought we cannot make another blatantly political record, that is not where we wanted to go. I think it matched where we needed to go in terms of content, and this new musical direction also was forming."
Narelle Walker
 | 'The Woods' is out now through Stomp. |
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