Spiderland

The other day I was talking to a fellow musician about music that we should all listen to.  Spiderland  was one of the first ones that popped in my head.  It's an album I never listened to until way after high school. It came out in 1991 and as I mention below, four years is way too long to ignore a great album such as Spiderland is.  When I got home it was a flood of memories like the first day of listening.  The music started a genre called Post-Rock and when you hear you can fully understand why something like this a trap to the ears and where music geeks such as myself love talking about it to this day.

Though largely overlooked during their relatively brief lifespan, Slint grew to become one of the most influential and far-reaching bands to emerge from the American underground rock community of the 1980s; innovative and iconoclastic, the group's deft, extremist manipulations of volume, tempo, and structure cast them as clear progenitors of the post-rock movement which blossomed during the following decade.(AM) People tell me that I am a wealth of musical knowledge, but this one I was behind the curve on. I regret not picking up on this till 1995 or so when one of the songs was featured on the soundtrack to the movie KIDS. Even then I would hear this on the radio and try to figure out what was going on. I picked up the album used and confessed to the guy at the register that I have never heard it, but hearing some of the music on the radio station I listen to.

Slint may only have an album and an EP to their credit, but the effects what they did for music are so important that some bands we listen to now and take for granted. Every time I hear the album it still sends shivers down my spine how it quietly and effectively destroyed everything we knew about how to make an interesting album. It did need solo's from guitars or heavy drums to sound great, it just did it on it's own. Slint broke down barriers that we thought never existed and destroyed everything we knew about music or ideas on how music should be done.

I remember buying the CD having no idea what to expect except the one song I heard and I knew that I liked it. The friend of mine who worked the record store I went to frequently told me how much he loved it. He even told me he wanted to create a band just like that. Once I bought it he quickly opened the CD and put it in the CD player and played it.

The irregularity of its hypnotic melodies, fractured beats, and mismatched lyrics demand a new kind of appreciation, independent of traditional notions of songcraft. With its half-mumbled, half-hollered vocals, deliberate percussion, and drone-gone-aggressive guitars, Spiderland 's urgency is almost traumatic to swallow: despondency never tasted so real. The record's reputation can at times seem more ubiquitous than its songs, name-checked by impish upstarts with a kind of glib, dismissive familiarity. In truth, Spiderland 's influence is far more thorny and convoluted than its pat spoken legacy could ever convey. Turn up the volume and get out of its way. (pitchfork)

Slint is a must listen. I take great pride telling people that this an album that saved me from all the crap that was out there. At the time of the first listen of Spiderland I could have listened to other things that would have been a fad or questioned years from then and to now. Slint is great. Enjoy as much as I do and remember to play it loud. Enjoy!