Better Than Nevermind - No. 9 : Slint - Spiderland

Slint – Spiderland (Touch & Go)

Even 20 years later, it is difficult and sometimes impossible to describe Slint’s music in layman terms. Simply put, Slint is to 80’s rock what Velvet Underground was to 60’s rock music: a unique band made of brilliant musicians that would have far more influence after its breakup than during its brief existence. Spiderland was an enigma for me as much as VU the first time I got my hands on White Light/ White Heat. It grew on me slowly, and I couldn’t escape going back to it, like a stylistic black hole, an event horizon of all rock music experiments and beyond, from progressive (especially the Canterbury school) to punk to hardcore by the way of kraut rock. Spiderland is more than a mere hybrid though – it is a true syncretism-with-idiosyncrasies, like a new math theorem based on former calculations but reinventing the language and breaking new ground. The math comparison goes beyond the mere surface. The whole geometry of the album, the inner workings are quite the complicated beast. The record starts with Breadcrumb Trails and a deceptively simple guitar riff superimposed on syncopated drums and a barely audible. The pauses are deliberately inserted and the song erupts in dissonant guitar and wails, morphing into a caterpillar of fuzz that slowly ascends and descends mounds of floating riffs before the chaos lingers and the original motif comes back. A palindrome ? A sonic metaphor for the title ? The second song starts with sparse drums at martial yet still syncopated pace, the guitar and bass are trading empty spaces like a nonchalant couple entropic ping pong balls. The same acidic guitar tone tears those spaces in a non-haphazard way. A long introduction for their version of a hardcore interlude? The pattern is reiterated but at some point half deflated to become a skewed rock shuffle that _sounds_ standard yet wobbles on the not really off-key bass. The insertion of drumstick clicks to punctuate the change in jagged riffage brings to mind an orchestra of outer beings speaking a complicated alien language but with rock instruments that they have learned. The meandering becomes again expectative before they leave the listener with a simple guitar reverb. The following, Don, Aman starts like a Tom Waits soliloquy but with guitar strings instead of piano, less the alcohol encrusted growl. A few drops of chords then the buildup of strumming and whispering is slow and brooding, mesmerizing even, a few sparks of electric guitar, another voice in the distance. At two thirds of the song, the pressure cannot be contained and one of the guitar becomes distorted even though the strumming pattern remains the same, only to be subdued again, like a Sonic Youth song losing steam, until the story comes to a closure, the guitars and the bass interlace and fade out. Is that a guitar coughing at the end?. The second half of the album starts quiet and subtle before the instruments chime in, guitar interplays on strummed bass short chords. The first real singing is intoned, solemn and melancholic, almost glacial. The pattern of subdued guitars and bass, slightly distorted if at all, with floor toms followed by chiming arpeggios and melancholic singing has molded another archetype in rock, that was present in its basic elements but only congealed with Slint’s intuitive playing, and the plaintive voice backed only by drums and sparse microchords, as if a drizzle of notes permeated the air, and a buildup that becomes a hiccup to another soliloquy, on of the singlemost unnerving and genius event of the song and album, as is the tinny almost inaudible cascade of picking. My head is empty/My toes are warm/I am saved from harm gives way to the envolee we were expecting, that delivers punches of flams and bursts of distortion only for a few seconds before simmering back to the cauldron of subdued emotions. The penultimate track also simmers in a bubbling stream of nonchalant riffs and downtempo and all that quiescence is deafening. For Dinner… is a low rumble of ember timbres that meander in an Antarctic stillness which the instruments cut asymmetrically until all that remains are echoes of electric waves shimmering on razor thin ice shingles. The record ends with one of the most brilliant rock songs recorded, Good Morning Captain, a chiming ticktock of the guitars interlaced with dropped bass notes, stopped by the mumbling of the vocalist, supported by a clunking drum percolating with microbursts and short fills, the simple bass chord suddenly an off key lifeline to a bloom of fuzz that gets swallowed back and forth by the drumming into subdued chiming to fuzz to quiescence in a surgical opening of a clockwork heart of an ice and foil golem struggling to crawl forward. The strings jittering signal a reactivation, as the whispers and declamation is drowned in skewed dynamics, distortion and the last gasps of guitar riffs and drum rolls envelop the screams: I’ll miss you!/I’ll miss you! A true masterpiece has unfurled from our ears and buried itself into our consciousness. Rock music would never be the same.