I've made it through The Woods quite a few times now, and read all the reviews I can find on the subject, and i have something i want to say to music critics everywhere: If i hear one more person reference Led Zeppelin when talking about Sleater-Kinney, i may go crazy.

Yes, Carrie Brownstein's tone on The Woods is muddier and dirtier than on the six previous albums (or at least the four back to and including Dig Me Out. Yes, there are guitar freakouts. Yes, there's an 11 minute song. But The Woods are to "Classic Rock" as The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady was to Scott Fucking Joplin. Deal with it. And then instead of lazily invoking John Bonham so you don't have to talk about the awesomeness of Janet Weiss as Janet Weiss, listen to the actual CD you are supposed to be reviewing and engage it directly, cause there's a hell of a lot more going on "Let's Call It Love" than in "Misty Mountain Hop."

The Woods is about the failure of language and about finding new sites of and paths to articulation, it's about the complete collapse of reason in the post-reality-based-community era ("reality is the new fiction they say/truth is truer these days/truth is man made") it's about the transformative powers of rage and despair, among other things. Write about that, you lazy ossified self-satisfied commodity fetishizers!


Blog's been getting a lot of search hits lately for my name. Which begs the question, who is googling/yahooing me? And what do they want? Show yourself!!!