Is Janet Weiss the best rock drummer in the world? That question crossed my mind last January when I saw her and her ex-husband Sam Coomes, collectively known as Quasi, open for Elliott Smith. Though Coomes is the focus of the duo since he writes and sings almost all the songs, Weiss's contribution was more than rhythmic.

Quasi has no bassist, so Weiss is the rhythm section, and the musicality of her playing was breathtaking. Built like an Olympic swimmer, she has the shoulders for sustained loud-and-fast attacks, but at the same time she stuffed the spaces between the backbeats with harmonic cymbal and tom-tom fills. When I think of punk drummers, I don't think of people who tune their kits, but Weiss's sounded like a choir.

Her main gig is as the stickperson for Sleater-Kinney, the Olympia, Wash., trio that has been blowing critics' minds since their second album, "Call the Doctor," was released in 1996. Weiss didn't play on that album, since she didn't join the group until "Dig Me Out," S-K's stone masterpiece that was released the following year. Nevertheless, during the band's Tokyo debut at Shinjuku Loft June 28, she sang lead vocals on "Hubcap," which is from "Doctor," while at the same time beating out a complex, off-kilter snare and cymbal pattern that was an immeasurable improvement on the original CD version.

Like Quasi, Sleater-Kinney has no bass player. Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein both play guitar and sing, but their often discordant guitar interplay is greater than the sum of their picking and strumming, and their vocals transcend such reductive categories as lead and backup. Like Weiss's time-keeping, their musical interaction reveals an artistic ambition that looms large next to that of the majority of musicians who play punk.

"And when the body finally starts to go, let it all go at once," Tucker sang-spoke at the start of "Get Up," but she didn't let go. While Brownstein played out a syncopated blues riff, Tucker maintained a rapid two-note strum and Weiss struck her high-hat on the off-beats, creating an atmosphere of palpable tension that expanded when Tucker cried "they're calling on me" in her chilling, full-throttle vibrato. Even Brownstein's lighthearted counter-vocals didn't allay the tension, at least not until both singers burst forth as one on the climactic line, "Like lovers, get up, too far."

Tension-and-release is the emotional dynamic of all music, but Sleater-Kinney may be the first great rock band since Nirvana who deigns to make a cottage industry out of it. "Heart Factory" opens with a fairly unassuming discordant strum and a kiss-off verse by Brownstein that hits heavy during the chorus when Tucker does her amazing banshee thing. It could be a standard mid-tempo hard rock tune, and one that most punk bands would give their right testicle for, but Weiss didn't allow it to be. She created an impossibly deep, reverberating tone on the toms that lifted the chorus up.

Tucker, who is the last person you'd expect to be surprised, had to literally catch her breath and the crowd reacted as if it had been hit with a sledgehammer. Who needs a bass when you can produce that kind of bottom on the drums -- and in tune?

S-K's lyrics often veer into a spiritual wilderness that some people will find too dark and obscure. They're especially in evidence on the new album, "The Hot Rock," which is all love songs of mystery and dread. In concert, the words draw you in, because Tucker's self-absorption is so arresting. She's like a black hole of desire; any minute you think she'll implode. During those verses when the music held back she'd swoon, eyes closed, shoulders dipping to the beat, and then the chorus would crash down and her body stiffened as if she'd just been plugged in.

Brownstein, on the other hand, was all extroverted rockisms. If Tucker is the band's dark, impenetrable id, all appetite and fear, Brownstein is its ego, the face that the band shows to the world. On "One Song for You," she kept smiling at the ceiling during her vocal parts, as if she were enjoying some private joke, and when the song churned into its ecstatic coda she performed tight little windmills and hopped lithely across the stage while Tucker screamed in confused desperation, "It's a lie/It's the truth."

Brownstein emphasizes the playfulness that underlies a lot of S-K's sound. Tucker prefers to explore the lighter side of her own musical personality in her other band, Cadallaca, which channels the kind of urban girl-group punk pioneered by the Ronettes into three-piece power pop. But you can also hear it in S-K's "Turn It On," which has an unlosable backbeat that cries out for a chorus of handclaps as Tucker sings "When you touch me, I cannot stand up." It was the perfect song to end the set.

They returned with the delightfully unserious "Little Babies," a song that could have been written by Alice Cooper in one of his paean-to-adolescence moods, except Cooper wouldn't have written a chorus that goes "dum dum dee dee dee dum dum dee dum do." Snarls, squeaks, grunts, and other assorted vocal quirks make it a natural singalong, except most audiences don't have the chops for it.

This audience, though enthusiastic, was too small to produce enough density for even a mosh pit (though they tried, bless their hearts). Nevertheless, they managed a noticeable outpouring of heat and vertical motility for the band's unofficial anthem, "Words and Guitar," a three-minute blaze of white-hot energy about the primal attraction of their chosen profession. "Words and guitar," Tucker shouted, "we got 'em." They certainly do, but don't forget that drummer.