No, wait. Come back! It’s nothing too scary, I promise. It just seems to me that the natural lifespan of a band is about ten years, give or take. After that, it’s usually a slow slide into mediocrity - bogus “live” albums full of studio overdubs, “greatest hits” packages with one or two new songs tacked on so the die-hards will have to shell out for it, and flailing attempts at “updating the band’s sound” which end up sounding like the desperate grabs at relevance that they are. This model fits most former greats - the ones who didn’t flame out before hitting the ten-year wall, anyway. The Rolling Stones (and how!) and The Who are both prime examples of the phenomena. I sorta gave up on REM around Automatic For The People, which if memory serves came out sometime near their ten-year anniversary. And we all know what happened to U2 in the 90’s, right? (The jury is still out as to whether they’ve rehabilitated themselves, as far as I’m concerned, although I know there are many among you who will say that that particular ship has already sailed.) The list goes on and on from there.

Now, it doesn’t have to be this way. It is possible for a band to shake off incipient decrepitude and actually reinvent themselves. Some attempt the reinvention part only to fail spectacularly, making themselves look foolish. (Letter U, numeral 2.) Some bands succeed in remaking themselves, only to alienate their core audience. Fans are a fickle lot. While they profess devotion to a band, they are often the first to scream “sell out!’ where their favorites deviate from the set pattern. Modest Mouse found that out last year.

Growth and change can be scary.

Every now and again, though, you’ll find a band that gets it right. Take, for example, Sleater-Kinney*. Finding themselves recording their seventh album in ten years, and with a very… recognizable sound, they chose to switch labels (leaving Kill Rock Stars for Sub Pop), producers (leaving John Goodmanson for Mercury Rev/Flaming Lips producer Dave Fridman), and, ultimately, the safe yet restrictive confines of the standard S-K sound for the immensely satisfying fierce roaring sprawl that is The Woods.

This is not your mother’s Sleater-Kinney. From the first blast of feedback in the opening seconds of the lover’s fable “The Fox”, the listener knows something is up. The cold hard truth is that this is an album with heft to it. As wonderful as Sleater-Kinney has been in the past, it’s fair to say that they often came across, on record, on the thin and tinny end of the scale. No more. The sound of S-K albums past has been buried, partially by the contributions of Fridman on bass(!) and keyboards, but mostly by the distorted, blown-out and just plain fucking loud efforts of Carrie Brownstein, Guitar Heroine. Yeah, you read that right.

Now, don’t misunderstand me – this is very definitely a group effort. And Janet Weiss (for my money, quite possibly the best drummer currently working) and vocalist/guitarist Corin Tucker both step up their game. The band claims to have studied some classic rock in preparation for this disc, and it shows, in Brownstein’s guitar work, certainly, but also in Weiss’ approach to drumming. At times you’ll hear bits reminiscent of Bonham and Moon in addition to her own inventive style. On an “ordinary” S-K album that would be overkill, but this time out it fits right in with the overall tenor of things. Big songs require big drum sounds, and that’s what Weiss brings.

To my ears Tucker has very definitely matured, in every good sense of the word, as a singer. In the past her vocals have often seemed somewhat affected to my ears, but with her performance on this album she earns each and every vocal tic in her arsenal. She validates all previous transgressions, real and perceived, with her bulging-veined, red-faced “NO LOOKING BACK!” in “The Fox”. And she just gets better from there. Digging in and swooping upward on “What’s Mine Is Yours”, physically pulling the protagonist of “Jumpers” to her doom (“let’s GO!”), goading her partner into some sweaty, ecstatic sex in “Let’s Call It Love”, Tucker is never less than compelling, which hasn’t always been the case in the past.

All that being said, it really is Brownstein’s album. Her guitar is a physical presence throughout, thick and meaty, crushing the weak and unwary. On occasion, it appears out of nowhere; the solo she lays down over “What’s Mine Is Yours” is something of a WTF moment, a slice of Avalon Ballroom/Fillmore West in an MTV/MTV2/VH1 world. In others, it’s completely organic – “Wilderness”, for example, or “Rollercoaster”. One thing it never is is tentative.

“Entertain” is the heart of The Woods, by virtue of the slabs of riffage and Brownstein’s gloriously unhinged vocal. Toronto’s Eye Weekly described the song as “pop-culture skeet-shooting”, a term which I am hereby appropriating. Pull! “Reality” TV, toothless neo-post-punk, people who only allow their entertainment to wash over them without ever examining just what it is that’s making the water blue – BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! “Where’s the ‘fuck you’? / Where’s the black and blue?” Where, indeed. If this were a just world, this song would be the hit of the summer. Then again, if this were a just world they wouldn’t have had to record this song.

Elsewhere, we have the aforementioned “Jumpers”, the rockiest ode to teen suicide in some time; I found myself feeling guilty for digging the song so much, since lyrically it deals with the last hours of a student on her way to end it all from the deck of the Golden Gate Bridge**. And yet, it never comes off as being exploitative, as such songs often are. I mentioned earlier that it seemed as if Tucker were hurrying along the protagonist; given the splendid riff the band have given her, and the repeated line “you’re not the only one”, perhaps she’s actually pulling in the other direction.

And, lest you come a way with the impression that The Woods is all rough sledding, allow me to point out the other Brownstein vocal track, the summery, harmonica-driven (courtesy of Janet Weiss) existential statement of “Modern Girl”. It stands out by virtue of its lighter touch, while still carrying forward the S-K message that things are perhaps not as well as they might seem. Also, it tends to throw the overall heavy-osity of the new sound into sharp relief.

So, the question you’re probably asking right now is “Does all this sonic mayhem hold up?” For the most part, the answer is yes. Brownstein’s instrumental dramatics generally suit the needs of the song, and when they don’t, they at least keep the listener on his/her toes. And I think that’s really the point here. It’s not about “giving the people what they want”, but rather catching them off guard.

The best example of that approach on this particular record is “Let’s Call It Love”, the eleven minute S-K answer to, yes, “Whole Lotta Love”. While the former was all about Bob Plant giving some sweet li’l groupie every inch of his lurve and then dispensing with her, Corin Tucker conjures up a sweaty bout of intense, cathartic sex between two long-time partners. “A woman is not a girl / I could show you a thing or two / I’ve got a long time for love”. Without wanting to go all “male gaze” on the proceedings, there’s more red-blooded sexuality in Tucker’s “C’mon, let’s go to the mat / Hit the floor honey, let’s battle it out” than in the entire Led Zep catalogue, bootlegs included. The music throbs (sorry, but that’s really the only word for it) and grinds for about 5:20 of foreplay, and then Brownstein jumps in for her psychedelic take on The Main Event, propelled by Weiss’ Bonhamesque pummeling. It kinda drags out a little longer than is probably a good idea – I’m a little reluctant to use the term “wanking”, given the subject matter of the song, but it’s not far off.

But see, that’s the subversive thing about The Woods in general, and this song in particular – it’s the last thing you’d expect from this band. And that’s exactly why they did it. Sleater-Kinney has never been a band to cater to the public’s expectations, at least not to my understanding. In that context, in light of their desire to subvert their audience’s expectations and make them actually think about the music, think about the subject matter, think maybe for once in their media-saturated cable-modemed movie-on-demand lives, this album makes absolute crystalline sense. And that, my friends, is also why this album is punk as fuck.

The noise-jam of “Let’s Call It Love” dissolves into “Night Light”, an attempt to make secular sense of the seemingly conservative-fundamentalist world we currently find ourselves living in. It’s quite possibly the most beautiful vocal Tucker has ever recorded, because it is so longing and so heartfelt. There’s no sense at all that when she sings “How do you do it / this bitter and bloody world / keep it together and shine for your family”, it’s anything other than a personal plea for help in making it through one more day, in more or less one piece. And so, in the final two songs of this disc, we have, summed up nicely, the twin poles of Sleater-Kinney politics: the personal/sexual, and the personal/worldly.

In the Western tradition, The Woods have always been a place of change and transition. From the Greeks to the Romans to Shakespeare to the Brothers Grimm and beyond, interesting things happen there, for better or for worse. In the case of Sleater-Kinney, they emerge on the other side of The Woods victorious in their struggle against entropy. Their fans may be somewhat... er, dazed and confused from the journey, but I think they'll find that the ride was worth it.

(Sleater-Kinney’s The Woods is available through Sub Pop Records)

*S-K are named after a road in Olympia, Washington. Science Girl, who went to school down thataway, winces every time I mispronounce it. The official SG pronunciation guide: “Slayter-Kinney”, NOT “Sleeter-Kinney”. Carrie Brownstein is on record as saying that while she herself say “Slayter”, either pronunciation is OK. Use your own discretion.

** Minor quibble – “the lemons grow like tumors, they / are tiny suns infused with sour”, while a very good line in and of itself, isn’t really agriculturally correct. Citrus trees don’t tend to do that well in the Bay Area, as they don’t get the heat they need. In the Central Valley, sure; in Southern California; definitely; in San Francisco, not so much. It’s not impossible to grow lemons there, but it’s close. S-K, being daughters of the Great Pacific Northwest and therefore not exposed to the ways of citrus fruit, wouldn’t know this. I realize exactly how pedantic I’m being on this point, but the former 4-H’er in me won’t let it be.