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SPIDERLANDSlintProg Related |
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This cd has some punkish tracks that don't really amuse me but it also has tracks that I like to think of as master pieces. Washer is a totally awesome track to my taste.
People who like post-rock must have this cd, you will find loving it overall

You have to listen to it a couple of times to really get in to this album. At first listen you probably will not notice the perfection of the very subtle guitar parts, and the whispered vocals which give me shivers down my spine every time i hear them.
This is really a five-star album, one of the best in my collection, and i am not even a big post-rock fan. Everyone who is interested in music and likes subtle, soft and sometimes exploding music (is that the definition of post-rock??) should own this one.

Slint has one of the creepiest styles in music ever. The guitar is there, only to make simple eerie riffs and weird complementing high noises which suit the music perfectly. The vocals whisper most of the time but when the crescendo hits the songs they are hard, he literally screams at the heavy points. The song all consist of very recognisable riffs with the eerie spoken/whispering vocals. The lyrics do a great job making the songs even sadder and creepier.
I can't really explain why but listening to this album has to be one of the saddest and still most pleasant experiences ever. The music really grabs you and takes you somewhere. It's very simple but just good. So I'd say very recommended album.
written for www.musicmademe.com

The album flows as if Brian McMahan was narrating a story whose final we can guess it is not going to be happy. It contains all the disturbed aspects of adolescent existence, functioning almost as a Freud trip to their cores, as the album has a very intimistic approach and the band members were simple kids (!) at the time. The first two tracks are the less depressive of the badge. Guitar interplay distortion in the opener track creates a strange and original effect. The album flows in a crescendo pain to its cathartic final. Indeed, the last track, "Good Morning Captain" is the album at its peak, their most known track, dealing with the loss of all of our friends in a terrible event, in a soft age. The combination of delicate minimalistic double-guitar aproach with the disturbing narration recreate perfectely such ambience, until the final explosion, the feeled scream "I'm in hell, i'm in hell, I miss you...". "Don, Aman" deals with the conscience of difference in a world of copied patterns and the terrible effects it may have to a self-questioning young man. In "Washer" the band creates a very depressive atmosphere with the subtle guitar lines, and it functions as a goodbye, taking epic contourns, as the author knew the inevitableness of the end, the terrible fate he could not avoid.
An historical album. It may be hard to believe how a group of 4 kids had such a visionary construction of rock, opening doors to bands like GY!BE, Explosions in the Sky, Tortoise, well, all the post-rock scene. An answer that certainly lies between the disturbed adolescent psychism.


Slint became famous only years after their split up, but finally they have been recognized as the founders of the post-rock movement, that had his true development from 2000 to now. "Spiderland" is not easy to listen, but it is still really original and introspective. Don't miss it, if you want to know the roots that gave birth to GYBE!, Mogwai, Sigur Ros etc.
5/5, above all for its historical value.

The music itself is often haunting in a spare, stripped-down sort of way. But if this is Math Rock, it's more on the level of a grade school primer, with time signatures stretching to odd meters of five or seven but never to anything more complicated (in other words: Henry Cow, they ain't).
Instead, it's the austere anti-Prog simplicity that makes the album so appealing, sounding like an impeccably produced garage band from backwoods Appalachia rehearsing on a dreary late autumn afternoon. The slowly strummed guitars erupt only occasionally onto fuzzed-out feedback, and the tentative vocals are typically heard in half-muttered spoken-word narratives, so quietly miked it's difficult to catch the actual words.
The album was released in 1991, and the band broke up soon afterward. No surprise there: the stark minimalism of their monochrome style was never very durable, and in the 40-some minutes of this one album the group all but exhausted its entire musical vocabulary.
Still, give them credit for being ahead of their time. The half dozen songs here evoke an almost palpable mood of inertia and melancholy better suited to our own collapsing 21st century economy, making the album the perfect soundtrack for times of quiet desperation.

Slint's Spiderland is evocative, emotional, and drove the depth of rock further than any non-prog band ever did, let alone the noise-rock scene from which is emerged. We are probably cheating by classifying math rock and post-rock as prog.
Using simple rock instrumentation, a droning bass, extremely careful use of dynamics, holding back rock's rough power in exchange for tension, Slint takes you on an emotional journey with their spoken, often whispered vocals and imaginitive stories. Good Morning Captain, their variation on the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, is the culmination of this, slowly building up tension in a bone-chilling atmosphere. If you're not breathless by the time this album ends, you probably don't have a soul.


I'm probably one of the few people who actually feels underwhelmed by Good Morning, Captain, but that's only in comparison to the other highlights! Nosferatu Man sounds like a product of the Grunge-era, but it still manages to surpass its genre limitations and create something that has not been done before. Just the mere fact that this track has a groove puts it over most material that the Seattle based bands could offer at the time. The definite stand-out track for me here is Washer which is a truly gorgeous composition. The track offers a pretty simple development pattern, but yet there is so power embedded into this 9 minute performance. If you have any doubts about purchasing the whole album then you can at least do yourself a favor by purchasing this one track off a digital download website of your choice.
This album is essential for fans of post-rock and an excellent addition to any rock music collection!
***** star songs: Nosferatu Man (5:34) Washer (8:50)
**** star songs: Breadcrumb Trail (5:55) Don, Aman (6:28) For Dinner... (5:05) Good Morning, Captain (7:39)

2(+), but remember, there's historical value in this release.


Let's forget about influence and importance though. Is this album good? Well I'd say it's much more than that. I've really never heard an album that sounded quite like this one. Much of the vocals are made up of spoken word that tells a story. It really adds to a creepy, tense atmosphere found throughout the album. The guitar riffs really fit the albums title, as I find them to have a "spider-y" feel to them. And of course, as with any good post-rock (or in this case, post-rockish) album, there is a great use of dynamics capable of sending chills down your spine at every turn.
So while this album does carry a very similar feel throughout, it's executed in different and new ways each song. "Washer" is a soothing track built around a drifting guitar riff. "Breadcrumb Trainer" is the most rocker like track on the album, but still carries the vibe the album is known for. Good Morning Captain is the one pure post rock song on the album. It still contains vocals which isn't a staple of the genre, but the whole song has pretty, but not melodic guitar sections that eventually builds into a chaos of "I miss you!!!". The best on the album, and very well executed climax.
If you're interested in dissecting post-rock to it's roots, there's no way you can not have this in your collection. A wonderful and inventive album that the genre owes so much to. A masterpiece in my eyes.

Considering the rock music landscape of 1991, Slint never should have lasted as long as they did. Grunge was being crowned king, and Nirvana was heir apparent; Pearl Jam, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Soundgarden all released seminal albums. Slint never had a chance. The Kentucky quartet was a blip on the radar, too far removed from the angst and major-label publicity of the Seattle scene. Growing up as a teenager in southern Indiana, I know exactly what it felt like to be a Midwestern kid in the early nineties. Bands like Nirvana were like a breath of fresh air, a perfect distillation of disillusion and antiestablishmentarianism wrapped up in a convenient, portion-controlled package. If you had played Spiderland for me in 1991, not only would it have not blown my mind, but would have been immediately discarded and disregarded. Music was not ready for Slint in 1991, and they broke up. A couple of years later, guitarist David Pajo joined a band called Tortoise. Their 1996 release Millions Now Living Will Never Die became a critical addition to the Post-Rock canon, a newly-dubbed genre that would not have been possible without Slint's contribution.
"Breadcrumb Trail" alternates between bars of three and four with jangly, solid-state aplomb. Artificial harmonics rattle and hum, Pajo hits the distortion pedal, and singer Brian McMahan's whispery voice cries out for help. Britt Walford leads "Nosferatu Man" with rimshots and stick clicks, applying cymbals only when absolutely necessary. The drummer's greatest contribution comes from his composition "Don, Aman" and its hauntingly accurate depiction of social anxiety disorder. Again the guitars crunch and moan but the drums never kick in. Any closure or payoff goes unanswered. You flip the record over, almost terrified to hear what comes next, and "Washer" soothes you momentarily. Then McMahan sings "Good night, my love...remember me as you fall to sleep" and you realize the nightmare has only just begun. "For Dinner" builds tension like a 2-liter bottle of soda being shook up. "Good Morning, Captain" takes the now rigidly tight bottle and slowly unscrews the cap, as uncomfortable anxiety gives way to catharsis. You flip the record back over, and listen to the whole thing again. Spiderland is an essential masterpiece of rock music.

It is interesting to hear just which parts influenced different post-rock acts that followed. The opener "Breadcrumb Trail" and its Godspeed! You Black Emperor narrations and the slower songs being heavily influential for Toby Driver's Maudlin Of The Well and Kayo Dot projects. Although I don't love this album as much as others simply because I find the vocals a bit weak in the screaming department and way too much talking instead of some kind of singing, I do recognize this as the landmark historically important album for what it is and I do kinda like the music which is mostly a punkish dissonance with a reggae kind of syncopation for a lot of the more upbeat tracks whilst the slower tracks are pure ambient riffing and atmospheric generators. Worth having alone for the mark it's made on the musical world but I can't say I enjoy listening to this on a regular basis. 3.5 rounded down


All that said, Spiderland is a bit unusual an example of both genres, since it was created when the sound of each hadn't been thoroughly codified. Most of the album is based in subdued, melancholic guitar rock with uneasy spoken narrations over them that occasionally, though briefly, build into tormented screams. The songs shift meter signatures frequently, with the first two songs in particular using at least five time signatures each and shifting between them rapidly; it's easy to see how the genre of "math rock" got its name. "Washer" is the only song whose vocals are mostly sung, and it's perhaps unsurprisingly the most melancholy piece here, being a lengthy rumination on sleep and death. These are two themes that seem to underpin the entire album; the whole album has an eerie, dreamlike quality that only unsettles more as the album pushes towards its climax.
That climax comes with "Good Morning, Captain", a piece inspired by Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. While the whole album has been a bit unsettling to this point, "Good Morning" takes this to a new level, with the entire song based around a dissonant chord pattern and climaxing in the most tortured screams on the whole record (and, arguably, some of the most unsettling in the history of rock music). It's said that some of the band members had to be institutionalised after they completed the recording process (which was accomplished in a marathon four-day session); in particular, vocalist Brian McMahon's screams on "Good Morning" are said to have contributed to this.
Much has been written about the album's sound, but it's worth taking a look at the album's lyrics as well. Firstly, there is an underlying subtext of sleep and dreams to the album's songs: Don in "Don, Aman" makes the momentous decision that concludes the song after sleep; "Washer" touches on the sanctuary of sleep and yet also the fear of losing things within sleep; the narrative focus of many of the songs takes on the atmosphere of a dream.
Perhaps more important to the album's musical subtext, though, is the undercurrent of horror and trauma. The album tends to be sparse on narrative detail, written as though a listener is already familiar with the locales in which the songs are set - which, of course, we are not. This lets us focus more on the events described in the songs, but these, too, are often sparse on detail. Even the opening "Breadcrumb Trail", which on its surface is a description of a romantic meeting between its unnamed narrator and a fortune-teller, is written in a way that unsettles a listener slightly. Psychologists have noted that victims of trauma often elide both foundational context and the horrifying truth of the trauma itself, and the song itself, with its supporting cast of the "soiled" and grotesque, certainly makes us feel as though we have been made party to some fundamental revelation, yet the revelation itself is never made clear.
This continues throughout the album, as most of songs conclude with a momentous event that is never actually described. The queen in "Nosferatu Man" dies, but we never find out how (though it's implied through vampirism); Don in "Don, Aman" makes a momentous decision, but we never find out what; the captain of "Good Morning, Captain" appears to be fleeing some Lovecraftian horror, but the horror is never described. The entire album has an undercurrent of Gothic horror, and the fact that its narration is so sparse on details makes it more unsettling, not less; the songs wouldn't be nearly as effective without their lyrical content.
It's difficult to look at the album now divorced from its historical context. The fact that Slint broke up shortly after making this recording no doubt further contributes to its mystique (despite planning to go on tour and even having a notice saying that interested female vocalists should contact the band). They have reunited sporadically since then and have hinted that some day they may produce new material; they have even performed new songs occasionally, but thus far this remains Slint's final studio album. Even if they never record another note of music, their legacy will have been secured with this album.

"Tweez" in '89 showed a promising post-hardcore band through their fierce early math punk, but they suddenly decided to slow things down, hold fury back, and sprawl in a way never done before. They took an important early thread of the aptly named slowcore movement, that of a lethargic rock band who wasn't afraid to suddenly catapult into pitch and rage (see also Codeine's classic "Frigid Stars LP"), and did two now legendary things with this style and formula: one was to contort the slow side into something drawn out and more textural than riffy, perhaps also a corruption of "Spirit of Eden"'s guitar lines; and using what was left in them of their hardcore math for the rage moments. This of course proved doubly genre defining and makes for a depressedly beautiful and smashing record. Especially vital to this new form was also how sheerly angular it was, making everything about it in at least some small way connected to math with it's irregular time signatures in a way lost on most later post, similar to them also leaving Talk Talk's fusion side behind.
In spite of minimal takes during the sessions, the whole process proved brutal, refreshing as it was to the band themselves to hear their new sound, likely encouraging the particular atmosphere of the tracks. As well, due to this and not having written any lyrics beforehand, during the original compositional process, the band quickly threw together some suitably dark lyrics in the studio that were mainly spoken word; this proved the final piece of the puzzle, the last element to pull everything together, to make tracks like "Breadcrumb Trail" so immediately gripping and undeniably brilliant. The result is massively influential and the ultimate soundtrack to desolate countrysides and dying cities, a brilliantly formed and excellently played magnum opus.

If SPIDERLAND is the mother of all post-rock, then perhaps it is safe to assume the offsprings are more accomplished than their progenitors. The bands inspired by SLINT were able to deliver much more memorable post-rock moments, and due to that, SPIDERLAND's only quality is its historical importance. Because, musically speaking, it fails to be worth more than one-third of an hour.
I guess no one can deny SPIDERLAND is experimental and able to deliver an intensely gloomy, desolate, alienated atmosphere. Its recording sessions were filled with disturbing, nervous moments, and perhaps the music is a reflex of it. Conceptually, it's accomplished; a twisted materialization of SLINT's pure gloom and isolation.
Musically... not so much. It has shares of interesting and sincerely tedious moments, where the latter, sadly, is prominent. The first two tracks, as well as the latter, offer solid performances, eclectic variety of interesting and unusual guitar riffs and a technicality that hint its math-rock tendencies and explains SPIDERLAND's status as a landmark. However, from tracks three to six, the dominant stillness is just unnerving. Unnervingly boring, that is.
Music should be equally meaningful and enjoyable to make a good experience, but in SPIDERLAND, SLINT oversaturated the first at the expense of the latter. And the result, in the end, is a somewhat bleak release, with much potential that couldn't be satisfactorily conveyed, even though it does have its share of fine portions that depict SPIDERLAND could be something more.
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