Spiderland

“We’re from Louisville, and we thought you needed to hear this.” These words are heard deep into the rarities portion of this 3xLP box set, as the introduction to a live recording dating back to a 1989 Chicago show in support of Slint’s raucous debut album, Tweez. And just what did Slint think their audience—who, judging from the faint smattering of applause, barely cracked the double digits—needed to hear at that moment? A freakin’ Neil Young cover, and a wholly reverential, note-for-note eight-minute reading of “Cortez the Killer”, at that. But the moment is significant nonetheless, and not just because “Cortez” proved to be the root DNA of the ominously methodical music they would go onto explore; that brief spoken introduction counts as an extremely rare document of Slint actually asserting their worth in public.

In many respects, the story of Slint is an exceedingly familiar one of influence accruing in absentia, of mavericks who were ignored in their time and had to wait years to get their due. Except unlike other members of the criminally neglected alt-rock trailblazer club—from the Stooges and Big Star to Pixies and My Bloody Valentine—Slint didn’t just fail at becoming the world-beating superstars that their record labels and music-critic boosters alike hoped they would be. Through their initial 1986-1991 existence, Slint were obscure outsiders even within the subterranean confines of the American indie-rock underground.

Compared to the get-in-the-van, play-anywhere ethic practised by fellow 1980s-hardcore students, Slint rarely performed live, and when they did, it was rarely as a headliner. Interviews were scarce; band photos all the more so. Spiderland—their second, final, and ultimately most revered album—wasn’t some painstaking, Loveless-scaled masterwork belabored over in the studio for months on end; it was a collection of six pared-down basement jams recorded over a single weekend, with many of the lyrics rush-written at the last minute. And Slint were so uncertain of their purpose upon the album’s completion, they actually included a call-out for female-vocalist auditions on record’s back cover, before just deciding to disband altogether prior to its official release. With Spiderland’s chilling, dead-of-night ambience, its predatory rhythmic gait, spine-tingling guitar plucks, and short-story narratives recited in unnervingly hushed tones, Slint had essentially crafted the mysterious soundtrack to their own disappearance. Even that seemingly innocuous, Will Oldham-shot album cover of the band members playfully swimming in a quarry looks just like the sort of photo you see on an 11 o’clock news bulletin about four local teens who went missing on a camping trip.

It wasn’t until their friends—in bands as stylistically divergent but spiritually connected as the Jesus Lizard and Palace Brothers—achieved some degree of national renown in the mid-90s that Slint began its transformation from footnote to boldface; to read interviews with these and other affiliated groups in magazines such as RayGun, Alternative Press, and Option was to play a game of Spot the Spiderland Namedrop. By 1995, Slint started turning up on major-label-issued movie soundtracks; by ’96, Gavin Rossdale was dialing up Steve Albini—who recorded Tweez—to bring some of that corrosive crunch to Bush’s Razorblade Suitcase. And with the similarly atmospheric, equally explosive likes of Mogwai and Godspeed You! Black Emperor dominating the late-90s indie-rock conversation, Slint ceased to be just some band that had broken up too soon and became an entire subgenre of music unto itself.

But well after they ascended to sainthood status, Slint’s sense of timing remained as curiously off-kilter as the tempos of their signature songs. In 2005 the band reunited, a good five years after the post-rock they’re credited with spawning had peaked in popularity. And now, after a few years of intermittent touring, we have the 23rd-anniversary box-set reissue of Spiderland, featuring a much-needed remaster courtesy of Shellac’s Bob Weston, 14 previously unreleased outtakes, a handsome 104-page photographic history of the band (with a foreword from Oldham), and director Lance Bangs’ thorough and intimate feature-length documentary, Breadcrumb Trail. On the surface, it’s the sort of hefty package that adheres to the standard process of classic-rock-level canonization. But true to the band’s spirit, the set is ultimately a grandiose act of self-effacement. Because for all the mystique Slint have acquired over the past two decades, no one has been more mystified by the band’s rising posthumous reputation than Slint themselves. (I mean, just look at the cover of the box set—notice something missing?)

Rather than trumpet the album’s immense influence on subsequent generations of indie rockers, emo kids, and doom-metalheads alike, everything about this set works the other way to disassemble a quote-unquote classic into its basic raw materials. The demos practically break down Spiderland on a riff-by-riff basis, as we hear the songs devolve from pre-production dress rehearsals to rudimentary acoustic sketches recorded on cassette. The visual materials, meanwhile, trace Spiderland’s genesis back through the unheralded but highly fertile 80s Louisville post-hardcore community (which served as a sister scene to the Touch & Go/Drag City stables in Chicago), all the way to the formative relationship struck by band principals Britt Walford and Brian McMahan when they were kids attending a downtown alternative elementary school.

Early in Bangs’ film, Walford claims he was bored with rock‘n’roll by the time he was 11; by the time they were teenagers, he and McMahan were already bored with hardcore, having served time in horror-punk torchbearers (and certified Friends of Danzig) Maurice and Hüsker Dü-styled thrashers Squirrel Bait. When the duo formed Slint with Maurice guitarist David Pajo and bassist Ethan Buckler, there was little to suggest the band would amount to anything more than another of Walford and McMahan’s impulsive extracurricular projects, which at that point had included everything from videotaped improv comedy routines to cassettes featuring nothing but the sound of their flatulence, samples of which reportedly seeped into the mix of Tweez. Though obviously indebted to the caustic, caterwauling post-punk of their producer’s former band, Tweez also gleefully subverted underground orthodoxies: In contrast to hardcore’s stern, anti-authority-figure rhetoric, the band named each of the album’s songs after their parents, while Pajo’s avant-Halen squeals and Buckler’s muscular but dextrous basslines meant Tweez wound up not too many slam pits removed from late-80s funk-metal phenoms like Faith No More and Jane’s Addiction. (Dissatisfied with Albini’s recordings, Buckler left the band shortly after Tweez’s release, and was replaced by Todd Brashear.)

When Slint began working on the songs that would form Spiderland in 1989, the initial wave of post-hardcore indie rock was on the wane, with scene stalwarts either trading up (the major label-bound Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr.) or breaking up (Black Flag, Mission of Burma) or both (Hüsker Dü). Recorded by their friend Brian Paulson, Spiderland would forge a new indie-rock lexicon by applying hardcore’s emotional intensity to music that, formalistically speaking, was its complete inverse. Even in its heaviest moments, Spiderland wasn’t so much about rocking as stalking: Songs prowled instead of pummeled, with clean, glistening guitar lines (inspired by Pajo’s obsession with Minutemen’s D. Boon) accentuating lyrics that were muttered rather than screamed, all enhanced by a strategic use of space that meant the silences between the notes accumulated their own crushing weight. The album’s definitive bookend tracks—“Breadcrumb Trail” and “Good Morning, Captain”—don’t so much shift from quiet to loud as from bleak to blinding, with McMahan and Pajo emitting the sort of frequencies that make you cover your eyes instead of your ears. And when the band do encroach on something resembling conventional rock—like with the meaty, metallic, morse-code riffage of “Nosferatu Man”—it’s to a sadistic, merciless degree of excess, until you feel like the poor bastard in the movie Se7en whose stomach explodes after being force-fed too much spaghetti.

Spiderland’s volcanic outbursts naturally count as the album’s most bracing, memorable moments. The one drawback is that they occasionally obscured and overshadowed McMahan’s monologues, which remain eminently unnerving for both their delivery (not so much “spoken word” as melody-averse singing imbued with cold-blooded, dead-eyed dread) and their amazingly immersive economy. Even a simple opening line like “Don stepped outside” (from the distorto-folk centerpiece “Don, Aman”) instantly sets a vivid scene of simmering unease, of needing to escape from some stifling, suffocating situation; the devastatingly melancholic “Washer” scans as a break-up ballad, but could also very well be the prelude to a murder-suicide. (Fortunately, Weston’s new master gives McMahan’s voice a greater clarity, while the amplified-vocal demos of “Good Morning, Captain” and “Nosferatu Man”—not to mention the supplied lyric sheets—allow you to follow the words more closely.) Back on Tweez’s “Carol,” Slint hinted at the darkness lurking in the backwoods of suburbia “past where they paint the houses”; forsaking its predecessor’s inside jokes for outsized drama, Spiderland ventures past that point of no return where the mundane turns horrific, with songs of vampiric lust and county-fair roller-coaster rides and boat trips gone terribly wrong. When Slint do inevitably unleash the noise, it’s less a sonic device than a narrative one, to mark the moment after which, for the songs’ protagonists, nothing will ever be the same again.

And that seemed to be the case for the band itself. The one Slint legend Bangs’ film does confirm is that, after recording the harrowing vocal climax on “Good Morning, Captain,” McMahan checked himself into a hospital. And the fact that nothing more is said of his stay supports the theory that for Slint, Spiderland was something of a transformative, Deliverance-type experience for the band members—what began as a casual amusement among friends unwittingly lead them into somewhere very dark and disturbing, the details of which are never to be discussed publicly. (The box set reveals a couple of instrumental bed tracks from heretofore unpublicized, eventually aborted post-Spiderland sessions—the fragmented “Todd’s Song” and the drum-machine-ticked “Brian’s Song”. Their drifting, meandering nature suggests returning to the same headspace was too daunting a proposition.) Where Pajo would go on to enjoy some success with Tortoise, as Aerial/Papa M, and as an alt-rock ringer for Interpol and Yeah Yeah Yeahs, McMahan's post-Slint outfit, the For Carnation, has been dormant since 2000. Brashear—who wasn't involved in the reunion tours—now runs a video store. And Walford, once the galvanizing wünderkind of the Louisville scene (and, briefly, a Breeder), likewise receded into the sidelines as a supporting player for various Drag City acts and old blues-circuit singers alike, while sporadically working on music in private. (It's only now that he's reemerging with his first proper band in two decades, Watter, whose debut album comes out next month on Temporary Residence.)

However, the album’s shadowy aftermath doesn’t necessarily make Spiderland a more intriguing artifact; likewise, the fact its creators were actually a bunch of goofball pranksters from loving, supportive, well-to-do families in no way diminishes the album’s grim majesty and visceral potency. If anything, the elucidating peek behind the curtain that Bangs’ documentary provides makes the album feel like an even more singular, remarkable achievement. Spiderland has always felt like the work of old, wizened souls who had endured great physical and psychological trauma and barely survived to impart their cautionary tales. But even with the visual evidence presented here, it’s still hard to fathom that music this visionary, disciplined, and emotionally resonant was being made by a bunch of guys still in their teens. (Slint may have a great band, but they were even better actors.)  Spiderland’s greatest legacy is not that it motivated a cluster of semi-popular bands in the late-90s and early 2000s to adopt its whisper-to-scream schematic. It’s the boundless inspiration it perpetually provides for all the bands that have yet to emerge from the basement.