Indefinite hiatus

I actually got to meet Corin Tucker once. Her hair was indeterminately red or brown or blonde, but like any woman these days, it's probably been definitively all of those colors at some point. Her face is still as beautiful as it always was, but it would never qualify as conventionally beautiful - a little pouty and suspicious, always seeming to be angry with you in whatever picture of her is available. At the Sleater-Kinney concer att he Gothic Theather in Denver (or, Englewood) in September of last year, I went to buy a t-shirt (true to their activist ways, their t-shirts are only manufactured by American Apparrel), and I ordered one without looking, trying to find my credit card in my wallet. I looked up and was speechless - there she was, a satisfied smirk on her face, flowing purple top, breasts smaller in actual life than I would have guessed. Me, mumbling, or baffled, or simply trying to determine what method to approach the situation, only mustered saying, "You're Corin Tucker!" I said I was a huge fan, I pointed to a laminated LP of The Woods glued to the merchandise counter and told them the new album was amazing. I mentioned that once I wrote a ten page essay about wandering around Copenhagen and listening to One Beat constantly.

This was all I could really say about my relationship to Sleater-Kinney at the time. I could have also told Corin (one of its two lead-singer/ guitarists, along with Carrie Brownstein) I caught them on tour in 2000 in support of All Hands For The Bad One, that their albums seem to consistently mark changes in my life, but that may simply be my own inability to ever turn them off. I could have said I was once so obsessed with the band that I tracked down old demos of Heavens to Betsy and Excuse 17 (Tucker and Brownstein's Riot Grrrl bands before forming S-K), but that would not have been particularly original.

Sleater-Kinney announced a couple of weeks back that they were going on "indefinite hiatus." This cannot be too surprising, in any scenario; while making The Woods, the band - Tucker and Brownstein, and also drummer Janet Weiss since 1997 - went into couple's therapy, and came out of those sessions so angry, they made The Woods, an album for which adjectives like "loud" and "angry" were invented. An album that recalled, at any given moment, the most firey moments of Jimi Hendrix or The Velvet Underground or Sonic Youth or Jefferson Airplane or even The Who. An album I was alone in naming the best album of last year.

I will start with, and perhaps only talk about, The Woods. Not 1997's Dig Me Out, a 90's post-punk classic, and an indie icon. Not 1999's The Hot Rock and 2000's Bad One, fine albums, but mostly irrelevant. Not 2002's One Beat, a vituperative political record that is the culmination of all of their efforts as indie superstars, and another album I named the best of its year.

The reason I want to talk about The Woods some 14 months after its release is because I believe it to be not simply the type of album that bands spend their entire career working up to, but the type of album all of rock music seems to have been leading up to. This is only talking about its music, of course - The Woods was not particularly successful and is also not particularly popular. In fact, a friend of mine who worked forever at Albums On The Hill in Boulder told me I'm the only person he knows that even likes the thing (not entirely surprising - most fans of any art do not appreciate their artists abruptly changing their defined style and doing something different. These are the artists I appreciate most). He gave me a poster that's like a more cinematic rendering of its cover - a painted field of trees on a wood floor behind a parted red curtain.

Start with "The Fox." If you hear this song, I can guarantee you what your initial physical response to this song will be: you will turn down the volume on your stereo. A screech of feedback begins it, as though a warning of the ferocity to come. The guitars chug at such a volume you swear you hear planes taking off in the background, but would not be allowed to hear such things. Janet Weiss's drums are rifle-like, fast, and overwhelming. There is more to it of course - a weird morality tale of a duck and fox, spotting each other on the day of the duck's birth, but it is about the biggest jolt to the system a song can provide: Corin Tucker, whose shriek helped define the Riot Grrrls of the early 90's, is louder, more pleasing, and more precise than it's been before (a product, the band says, of forcing Tucker to sing in tones she hadn't tried before, pissing her off and confusing her to no end). In the song's scorching bridge, she's screaming some incomprehensible words at the top of her lungs.

I could say that my response to noisy music is unique, but to an extent, it's the only way to really approach the more ferocious emotions of rock music. That can be said of Velvet Underground or Sonic Youth, bands who trafficked in noise. Noise distances the listeners, but it also speaks to a general sense of feeling askew, of defiance, of working against an instruments' supposed purpose. It also speaks to the eventual indistinguishable nature of guitar riffs or guitar solos - sometimes noise is the only way to make any sort of notice in music.

But that's much too cerebral. I respond to noise. I walk easier when hearing it. I feel better listening to it, because at its core it means that the rules of guitar and of music are as made up as the ones in life. I find the notion of all things being made up about as comforting as any other.

The politics begin in track 2, "Wilderness," an allegory of a couple going nowhere and bickering the entire way - "It's a family feud/ the red and the blue now/ a two-headed brat/ tied to the other for life," Brownstein characterizes a country stagnant and whiny about it as Weiss's drums shoot away. In track 3, "What's Mine Is Yours," the one with a screeching minute-long solo that destroys and rebuilds the song, Tucker's voice has never sounded sexier. And by track 4, "Jumpers," - an eerie and explosive song about the thoughts of those leaping from the Golden Gate bridge - it should be clear that you may have never heard an album of such ferocity, an album of such well-ordered noise and defiance, and it makes sense to feel that way - these girls wear their influences on their sleeve, but the combined passion of these three influence sounds like nothing else.

In fact it occurs to me that there can be no slacking on the part of any of the three women for this type of thing to work - as Tucker wails differently now, Brownstein's typically-deadpan second vocals are now as empassioned as Tuckers, but directand cutting where Tucker's are high and elusive. David Browne in his review said he thought Weiss had spent the 3-year break between albums, "listening to nothing but Keith Moon recordings." Her drums are about as loud and fast and invigorating as anyone's since Moon died.

There are three songs on the second half of the record that are about as exciting as any I've heard. "Let's Call It Love," the 11-minute opus that defines the record, a song of exploding sexuality, and perhaps the only song on the record whose noise dominates the song structure, one that doesn't wind up coming back to a central refrain. It takes the gimmick of its noise and allows it to run free, experience all of the "love" emotions the writing speaks of - "A woman is not a girl/ I could show you a thing or two," Tucker sings, and damned if she doesn't show you a thing or two. It segues immediately into "Night Light," a three minute anthem that speaks of the forces of life and death, if not the ultimate conflict of all things. Tucker looks up to the sky and asks, "how do you do it/ with visions of worse to come/ live in the present/ and spin off the rays of the sun?"

But mostly there's "Entertain." I think this song will, amongst the few of us that knew of their existence, define Sleater-Kinney until the end of time. The drums pound in its opening seconds in a manner that subdues the listener, and Brownstein launches into "So you're here 'cause you want to be entertained/ please look away/ we're not here 'cause we want to entertain." This, of course, cannot be true of any band - after all, if you didn't want to entertain, why go on tour? Why release records? Why write, in 2000, a song about whiny boy rockers called "You're No Rock N' Roll Fun"?

However that thought will not arrive when listening to "Entertain." No thoughts will, really, besides those ones that keep us going, those thoughts that make us want to accomplish anything, those thoughts about not dying slowly, not giving into to the forces that oppress, the ones that keep all people from living their lives, from trying to find truth, from doing anything really. "Entertain," with its rallying cry of "Don't tread me down, I'm not falling down," is about the most exhilerating recording I've ever heard. It's a song of such ferocity that after the guitar and drums stop abruptly in its 6th minute, the recording lingers on a clank of the amps recovering, the equipment itself responding to the galvanic intensity of their own creation.

I wish I could have said that to Corin Tucker. That with The Woods, Sleater-Kinney made the type of album that inspires on the deepest of sensory level, but these things do not mean much when said, so I simply told her the album was "amazing." It speaks to the ongoing irrelevance of music critics everywhere that most of them named albums like Kanye West's Late Registration or Sufjan Stevens' Illinois or The New Pornographers' Twin Cinema as the album of the year. I like all of those albums, but they are, despite their various accomplishments, simply records. The Woods is not.