Much like a good short story, 1991's Spiderland, the second album by Slint (a group from Louisville, Kentucky) derives much of its power from what it leaves unsaid. Slint's own story is short, too. Formed in 1986, the band recorded a busy and noisy album called Tweez in 1987 before its members went away to college. When they returned home in 1990, they rehearsed and recorded the far superior follow-up, but split before it was released in March the following year.
In a few publications, that record received rave notices. But in the absence of interviews with the group’s members, or promotional tours, there wasn’t much to move the story on. The album’s reputation (salient remark: “It created its own world”) spread by word of mouth, and in 23 years it has gone on to sell a respectable 50,000 copies. “Slint bands”, who juxtaposed eerie calm with torrential noise, formed in its wake. In the absence of a story, Spiderland has instead acquired a legend, its fans filling the factual vacuum with rumour and inference.
Slint played contradictory guitar music, keeping rock’s power while dispensing with its conventions. The band retained riffs, quiet/loud dynamics and abrasive guitar noise, all spectacularly handled by David Pajo. To these, they added complex time signatures (Slint’s driving force was their drummer, Britt Walford) and muttered narratives (these the province of Walford and guitarist/singer Brian McMahan). The band’s newest member, Todd Brashear, played bass. Slint didn’t so much redraw the rock map as reassemble the elements of its landscape. At the time, people called this “post-rock”. These days, the spartan nature of the music can make it sound post-apocalyptic.
What little information could be gleaned outside the music was minimal. There was no name or title listed on the front cover, just the heads of four young men visible above the surface of the water in – we later discovered – the flooded Utica Quarry in Utica, Indiana, a half-hour drive from Louisville. (The fourth head belonged to the bassist for the album, Todd Brashear.) A note on the sleeve suggested that “interested female vocalists” should write to a residential Louisville address – as time passed, it was suggested that the British musician P J Harvey had written to declare her interest.
This was a strange and intense music, often of supernatural subject, and it was also speculated that playing it had exacted a terrible toll on Slint. Much contemporary credence was given to the theory that the band had split from medical necessity, when its members were forced into mental health institutions.
Such legend has only helped Spiderland. In 2005, the band reformed, belatedly to play the album in its entirety at a series of live shows, while a set like this one (a weighty box containing the original music remastered on CD and the band’s preferred vinyl, an additional 14 tracks of extras and demos, a book of photos, a documentary film and even a T-shirt) would seem to confirm the album’s legendary status. But so compendious is the data here – material from “riff tapes” and basement practice sessions – one wonders if it’s a counterproductive enterprise. Might not some of Spiderland’s mythos be dispelled by the evidence?
As rehearsal material included here shows, Spiderland’s minimal drama had nothing to do with studio trickery – the band were anyway playing these songs (and recording them) much as they appear on the finished album. Brian Paulson, who recorded the LP, achieved what Tweez producer Steve Albini called a “natural, neutral presentation” of the band’s sound. Far more pivotal to Spiderland’s effect was the band’s judicious editing of their material. As the extras here reveal, they removed from the album the busy, discordant Pam, and (a more borderline case) the superb, darkly propulsive instrumental Glenn.
Likewise, Spiderland’s songs work as much by what they leave out as what they put in; what isn’t played as important as what is. What was left out were rock conventions like verses and choruses, guitar solos and – for the most part – singing. Without these signposts, the remaining music feels puzzling and suspenseful – as in a thriller, you are always waiting for the other shoe to drop. In a Slint song, the chances are that when it does, it will drop very loudly indeed. Alongside the other songs on the album, Washer, having something like a vocal melody (“Wash yourself in your tears/Build your church on the strength of your faith…”) seems almost conventional – but its climax is as spectacular as it is unexpected.
In their subjects, meanwhile, the album’s six tracks sound like pitches for short films. The album opens with Breadcrumb Trail, in which a visit to a fairground fortune-teller takes an unexpected turn. Nosferatu Man follows a vampire going about his business. It closes with Good Morning, Captain, a scenario in which a ship’s captain survives a shipwreck only to be haunted by the lives he has failed to safeguard. Mysterious, deserted, vaguely watery – Spiderland is like a musical rendering of the Mary Celeste. The cover photograph of the box features a picture of the Utica Quarry, now without swimmers.
The elliptical element of the album is best represented by a song called Don, Aman. Here, the band’s music sounds even more vacated than usual: a piece without drums, the song comprises instead an angular guitar riff that mounts in intensity – effectively to mark scene changes in the song. It begins with a voice announcing “Don stepped outside…” with such solemnity, it confers on a man leaving a bar to visit the bathroom all the chilly drama of a spacewalk. As the song continues, Don returns to the bar, where he thinks about his alienation from the merriment under way there. As the guitar part becomes more agitated, Don leaves in his car. At the song’s end, the riff has returned to its former calm and we find Don reviewing his situation at home the next morning. We are told, alarmingly: “He knew what he had to do.” We’re not told what happens next, but the band has encouraged us to fear the worst.
If this box set performs a particular service, it’s to honour the power of that music, but also remind you that this was still a band: whose members listened to records, who went out and played shows, who had contemporaries. A nice example of this is on the sole live track here, a lovely cover of Neil Young’s Cortez the Killer from a gig in Evanston, Illinois in 1989. The crowd are hostile (“Go home!” is one of the friendlier heckles), but the band are unrepentant (“We’re from Louisville … We thought you needed to hear this …”).
It’s a great moment. Young’s song, a long-form guitar elegy, immediately makes sense: much like Young, Slint would use bright guitar melodies in tracks like Washer and Breadcrumb Trail to tell an ambiguous or troubling story. It also offers a reminder of the wider music scene the band were anomalous in. Spiderland was released in the same year as Nirvana’s Nevermind, a record which made explicit, and enormously successful, the emotional drama that Slint’s album internalised, and did not.
The documentary element of the set – Breadcrumb Trail, a film by Lance Bangs – doesn’t attempt much context, instead performing a more honest service. Bangs takes his own interest in the album as a starting point, then attempts to discover more about the people that made it, an artistic enactment of the record’s historic cycle. Even when he discovers – as a tabloid might say – “the truth behind the rumours”, it’s far from the end of the story.
So yes, according to Britt Walford’s parents Ron and Charlotte, in whose basement the band practised, P J Harvey may well have written a letter to their house. We discover that after making the album it was Brian McMahan who left Slint and checked himself into a hospital. Fittingly, given his contributions to the band, he apparently departed in language so enigmatic, only the bassist Todd Brashear understood him. “Man,” Brashear told the others, “he quit.”
Bangs also discovers unexpected elements of Slint, such as their sense of humour. This was a band who made cassette recordings of bodily functions; who drew signs for their car windows saying things like: “We’re in a band. And we’re cute!” He pieces together a comprehensive picture of bohemian Louisville and of the complex local punk scene from which the band emerged. He unearths details of a mysterious car crash in which McMahan nearly died, and hears about Walford’s post-Slint career in New York baking “erotic cakes”.
But as far as discovering a secret keycode which accesses the centre of the record, or breaking its hidden meaning? That’s something his excellent film doesn’t do – probably as much to his relief as anyone else’s. As important as it is, most important of all is that Spiderland retain its secrets.
John Robinson is associate editor of Uncut and The Guardian Guide’s rock critic. He lives in London.