super groovy delicious bite: the woods

Sleater-Kinney came through the emotional wilderness pitting truth against truth with timing and tiger strength on this ferocious tilt-a-whirl. After two albums on Chainsaw Records (Sleater-Kinney in 1995 and Call the Doctor in 1996) and four on Kill Rock Stars (Dig Me Out in 1997, The Hot Rock in 1999, All Hands on the Bad One in 2000, and One Beat in 2002), the trio signed with another independent label Sub Pop for 'The Woods'. The album was produced by Dave Fridmann and recorded at Tarbox Road Studios in Cassadaga, New York with Carrie Brownstein on guitar and vocals; Corin Tucker on vocals and guitar; and Janet Weiss on drums and backing vocals.

Brownstein: "[Dave Fridmann] was pretty critical of our old records and really reticent to say anything positive, actually, about anything we'd done - even the demos we'd sent him. The most positive thing he said before we got there was, "I'm excited to work on this record." But he thought all of our other records sounded the same. When we got there, he said that they never captured the emotional intensity of our band...It's all live. Everything but the vocals and some guitar overdubs...I felt like so much of the emotional tenor in this record is implicit in the music itself. The vocals were just sort of commenting on it or helping to accelerate it. Parts of the record that I think are really emotional come from through a sonic expression or through a guitar/drum expression. The vocals are just steering it, marking time or place. That's why the lyric writing was so difficult, trying to figure out how to make it congruent with what the music was saying without sabotaging or taking away from the music. It's such an album. One song comments on another or completes another song in a way, showing the other side of that story."

Weiss: "We knew we wanted something really intense, heavy and aggressive. We pushed ourselves so hard, almost to the point of irritation... With each other. A lot of times when we write, it's not pleasant. It's hard...The main performances are live. There's two guitars and drums on every song...I think that's what's so beautiful about the power trio. When the guitar player - usually it's a bass player, we have Corin in this case - goes to single notes or something high or jagged, there's that rhythm space that just drops. Like when Hendrix takes a solo, there's not someone playing rhythm guitar; I love that space. It's kind of unsettling and it's kind of scary, like the bottom dropped out...It's like, we know what Corin is capable of. We know what each of us is capable of, and we hope for even more than that. So if someone's having a bad day or if someone's not in the mood to bare their soul, we get on it. But Corin especially, when she gets emotional, all these amazing things start coming out of her. It's one of the more incredible things I've ever witnessed. So I feel kind of bad for pushing her and making her upset, but then something amazing happens and I don't feel so bad anymore."

Tucker: "There's definitely a negative creative process that happens that's really uncomfortable...I think this whole record kept pushing in this territory of doing something so different and so outside of ourselves...Part of it is keeping up with these two. On this record, they're going off. And I had to go off, too. I had to keep up with them."

'The Woods' went to number eighty on the US pop album chart and number two on the US independent album chart. Sleater-Kinney would go on an eight year hiatus the next year.