In their first album for quasi-major Sub Pop, Sleater-Kinney turn up the rock, discover the guitar solo and, in the process, flatten out their sound until it's almost unrecognizable. After floundering for the first half of The Woods, the band finally finds its feet with "Jumpers", "Modern Girl", "Entertain" and "Rollercoaster", but even this string of very strong songs cannot redeem what turns into the least interesting, least engaging Sleater-Kinney album ever.

The album starts with its murkiest, most turgid track in "The Fox", a parable of predation that's buried in fuzzy, undifferentiated distortion. The thing about Sleater-Kinney has always been the interaction between the band's three principals; you could almost hear them thinking as they tossed riffs and yelps and rhythms back and forth. Here, they move as a single machine, squashing differences in a hopelessly dull rock monolith. It's not just that it's loud and feedback-enhanced -- Kristen Hersh found a rainbow of nuance in 50 Foot Wave's distorted sounds earlier this year -- but that the off-kilter communicativeness of S-K's early work is gone. "Wilderness" sounds sparser, more naked, more like earlier songs, but it, too, feels flat and one-dimensional, and while "What's Mine Is Yours" starts with a fine, asymmetrical riff, it devolves into cock-rock (or whatever the distaff equivalent would be) excess. With this track, we hear the first long guitar solo; it might remind you a little of Hendrix's "Star Spangled Banner", except that it isn't nearly as good. It's that excessive, that look-at-me, that based in dinosaur rock.

At this point, you might be asking yourself, does this really blow as badly as I think it does, or is it just not what I expect from Sleater-Kinney? After a dozen listens, more in sorrow than in anger, I've come to believe that the answer is both -- and while you can respect the band's willingness to expand and experiment and run against expectations, the result is not merely surprising but disappointing.

Fortunately, just as I was about to give up on the whole album, it took a drastic turn for the better with "Jumpers", a nervous, tightly observed rock ode to suicides on San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. Here the storm of distortion is held in check behind precise, staccato desperation, building behind the chorus until it can no longer be contained, all the more powerful because it has been restrained for so much of the song. It's followed by the sardonic, gender-role-mocking "Modern Girl", whose harmonica-sincere observation that "My... whole... life... is like a picture of a sunny day," is undermined by its uneasy bed of guitars. The best song, though, the one that reminds you why Sleater-Kinney matters, is "Entertain". It begins with thunder, Weiss's pounding drums first all by themselves, then minimal and powerful under the passionate vocals. Spoken-sung, then embellished by Tucker's unmistakable whoops, the song dissects musical fashions while remaining absolutely true to itself. "One, two, three... if you want to take a shot at me, get in line," is the martial chorus, and if every song on The Woods were this good, I'd be putting the gun away. "Rollercoaster" is almost as strong. Here, for the first time, you really hear the dual guitars pursuing entirely separate ideas, coming together and diverging in ways that both complement and subvert each other. And again, the drums are powerful, the singing sweetness pushed to ragged extremes.

After these four songs, the energy dissipates. The band slouches into the laid-back "Steep Air", then launches the interminable "Let's Call It Love", which is heavy and repetitive but lacks the transformative power of decent drone. This 11 minute track somehow leads into the related "Night Light", again full of distorted guitars and light on compelling ideas.

For me, Sleater-Kinney has always been proof that women can rock as hard as men, but in a way that is as flamboyantly female as, say, The Rolling Stones were flamboyantly male. With The Woods, they seem to be reining in those differences and turning to loud-rock formulas that we've all heard done better. Maybe it's a chrysalis, and they'll eventually emerge different, better and stronger -- but for now, The Woods looks like a big step backward.