Almost from the moment Sleater-Kinney struck their first chord eight years ago in Olympia, Washington, the punk trio has delivered one of the most arresting sounds in rock: a hailstorm of chiming, percussive guitars and keening harmonies. From the start, the band's best music was fired by righteous outrage -- at a desiccated rock scene, at sexism, at suffocating social conformity. But unlike many of their Nineties indie-rock peers, Sleater-Kinney have grown with time, and their vocabulary of outrage has grown with them. The euphoric garage rock of 1997's Dig Me Out led to more opaque experiments on 1999's The Hot Rock; 2000's All Hands on the Bad One at once embraced more accessible rock and mocked it, turning pop against itself with girlish glee. Now, after a two-year hiatus in which guitarist Corin Tucker had a baby, guitarist Carrie Brownstein studied sociolinguistics and drummer Janet Weiss recorded with her ex-husband in Quasi, the three furies return with their sixth and most ambitious album, One Beat. Their riotous manifesto remains the same, but their musical dialect has expanded to include blues, soul and even traces of pristine Led Zeppelin-era metal. There's more than a tinge of Jimmy Page in Brownstein's wailing guitar, particularly on "Light-Rail Coyote," a rambunctious arena -- well, maybe gymnasium -- rock ode to the band's new home base of Portland, Oregon. And though she shows no aspirations to become the next Robert Plant, on One Beat, Tucker continues to stretch her formidable voice beyond her signature punk wails. With "Step Aside," she shakes what her mama gave her with a blast of Sixties soul and a power-to-the-people delivery, yowling, "This mama works till her back is sore/But the baby's fed and the tunes are pure" as horns blast and backup voices croon in high Motown style. Throughout One Beat, added instruments fill out the trio's two-guitar-and-drums, no-bass minimalism. "Funeral Song" uses the unlikely, but hauntingly effective, combination of a swampy blues drawl and a theremin. "Oh!" is an ebullient pop-punk number with surf organ, hand claps and swooning harmonies. On "Prisstina," Stephen Trask (of Hedwig and the Angry Inch songwriting fame) embellishes the mix with space-age analog keyboards. "Sympathy" is the standout among the CD's twelve tracks, a blazing blues prayer about a mother's bond with her fragile newborn. A slide guitar moans to the beat of a lonesome cowbell as Tucker belts her heart out like a backwater queen fighting for her own, "naked in the face of death and life," and on fire with maternal passion. In the September 11th elegy, "Far Away," rolling, harmonized choruses lapse into stuttered verses as Tucker recalls nursing her baby while watching "the world explode in flames" on her TV. The title song decries growing militarism as staccato vocals paint a world where "All that's on the surface/Are bloody arms and oil fields." "Step Aside" offers a directive against apathy: "When violence rules the world outside/And the headlines make me want to cry/It's not the time to just keep quiet/Speak up one time to the beat." With One Beat, S-K remind the moshing masses that punk spirit requires more than three-chord synchronicity. It needs hot water to thrive and a restless compulsion to push musical and political envelopes. Whether whupping their axes or singing the blues, the women of Sleater-Kinney are always pushing punk to the boiling point. NEVA CHONIN --

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