Everybody Loves Sleater-Kinney But You

The new Sleater-Kinney album is (finally) out. It's not what I expected, but it's awesome. Don't believe me? How about the Onion AV Club?

Although hard to digest at first, The Woods ingratiates itself on subsequent listens, making the band's other albums seem half-baked by comparison. Sleater-Kinney might have set the bar impossibly high for its subsequent albums.

Or, how about Metacritic, which gives it a score of 85:

Fans may have to have The Woods surgically removed from their players. It's just that powerful, demanding to be heard.

Even if you don't care for their music, you have to give Sleater-Kinney credit. They already had a lot of critical acclaim for their last couple of albums, and they could easily have sold out and gone mainstream and made a mint. They could have followed the same arc as most cool bands as they grow huge: reaching a plateau of of boring maturity. REM is my personal favorite example of this phenomenon. They "grew" from thoroughly cool pioneering rockers, of whom I'd immediately buy every new album, to boring purveyors of grocery-store background music who I couldn't care less about. With The Woods, Sleater-Kinney gives that career path six big middle fingers.

P.S., from their website, you can stream The Woods free, or download an MP3 of the first single, "Entertain".