Note: I would put 'editors note', but this is clearly a one man outfit. And as many grammatical and syntactic errors make it to the show room floor, this person would clearly be the worst editor ever. All that said, "Near Perfect Albums" is an ongoing series I'll be doing. The only criteria is an album has to be at least ten years old. Music is my first, and only deepest love...plus, these write-ups make great filler.
xoxo - S&D
Spiderland, Slint's 1991 masterpiece, is the quintessential--oft overlooked, frequently invoked, over praised for the wrong reasons, wrongly criticized for misguided reasons, thousand band launch pad--album.
Part of the trouble with this album's legacy is too many are dead set on listening to the record for what it's supposed to be as opposed to what it is. Over the years, so many well coiffed, black clad, music types--so desperate to give things a name--have piled terms like "post-rock" and "math rock" and "proto-space rock" and "shoe-gaze-core" on this album. These monikers, equal parts character assassination and obfuscation, plague the stand alone marvel Spiderland represents in rock and roll's rich genealogy. Also, these terms don't sound like anything anyone would want to listen to ever, which doesn't help. A band can't determine who springs up in their wake. Just as the decade of ritualized genre music which stands between the inception of this album and Slint's current acolytes is no fair condemnation of the work offered up in these five tracks.
What astounds, and concurrently confounds, me about this record: where did it come from? These are four kids from Louisville, Kentucky in the early 90's. Louisville is by no stretch a yokel town where talking music discs were some sort of witchery, but, you know...it's goddamn Kentucky. In the 90's! This is some pre-Internet shit. Even if they were underground music devotees, an era when that was an Odyssean task, it's still hard to compile the roster that could fuel an album like Spiderland.
Originality isn't really a thing, but this feels like a group of like-minded individuals who set out to forge a fiercely original moment. Influences always exist, but these are fully digested influences instead of the millstone so many other bands tote around their necks. And perhaps perceived originality is little more than influences so well understood, so absorbed, so deeply sublimated, they are anonymous.
Maybe they had Sonic Youth's "Evol", CAN's "Monster Movie", and Gang of Four's "Entertainment!" and twenty other albums I can't name all playing at the same time in their headphones while doing takes in the studio...
Or maybe, just maybe, they are four dudes from Kentucky who owned one transistor radio that only got a lousy AM signal, unaware of their secret Alien-God-King lineage. Alien-God-Kings sent to put the weird-bad-gross on us something real good.
As the story goes, the album was recorded in a live style over a furious four day stretch. Rumors abound about the nature of the session being so serious and intense, at least one member of the band had to be institutionalized for psychiatric care. Whether there was anything so traumatic as described in the mystery that helps prop up this album, there is something very sinister that lives beneath this record.
The cover of this album speaks so much to this content; nameless, stark, and submerged in black water. A churning, chaotic mass of fragile guitar parts, squalls of distorted fuzz, and spoken-screamed-sung lyrics. The tracks build with such deliberate contemplation and then blow apart in seismic gusts of cymbal crashes and dense crunch. The album, both in tone and structure, feels like some macabre world a child infuses in his simple playthings. A scene, grim and violent, built with tedious attention to detail. Well arranged action figures and wooden block built up only to be smashed apart by its own creator. An unpredictable vengeance rained down with fury. When the moment recedes, his creation underfoot, breathless, the child surveys the moment and begins to quietly rebuild.
The immediate dynamic of tension and release, or, in gross and oversimplified terms, loud-soft-loud-soft belies the thoughtful progression of this record. The album opens with delicate harmonics plucked from the ether like the first unshuttered frame of an over-saturated silent film. From there the album growls, jerks, weeps, snarls, stumbles, soars, and falters all the way to the final wash of feedback that floats you back out to the silent sea.
This is a beginning to end record. These songs out of context, ushered on deck by shuffle, or the singular track selected to woo a new listener, lose their potency. It's like bringing a friend a woman's severed leg, all exposed sinew and six inch pump, and being like, "this chick is crazy hot, am I right?" Not to say there is some meat-mouthed narrative clutched in this album's tendrils, but it is the clutching of the tendrils that matters.
Spiderland is meant to posses you. It drops like ink into milk. This album is a phase. This album is boarded windows and locked doors. This album is an unshakable feeling of dread. The emotional gravity--the scope of so many dangerous feelings--distilled into 39 minutes and 30 seconds is a remarkable power, and this is why when needle hits groove, none of the ancillary shit matters. The lore, the stupid genre names, the bands who assumed the mantle without a hint of the vivacity or dirty ingenuity Slint did it with, none of it. Because what shines thorough, what transcends even the notes themselves, that thing which moves me every time: the these young men gave all of themselves to this beautiful and hideous thing. And it aches.
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