Slint's Spiderland (10 page)

McMahan’s performance on “Washer” is the surest indication of this ambition. Though considered the band’s “singer,” McMahan had never actually
sung
before. Everything on
Tweez
, and the
Spiderland
songs they’d demoed, featured McMahan speaking or screaming (aside from Walford’s spoken contributions to “Nosferatu Man”). McMahan was not comfortable doing lead vocals of any kind, especially considering
he’d only practiced in privacy, performing for no one except perhaps Walford. It only added to the level of stress in the studio. “I’d never heard any of those lyrics until we got in the studio,” Brashear said. “I’m sure he was stressed out about recording vocals because that’s not something he was ever comfortable with. It even said on the record, “Interested female singers . . .” Even after the record was out, he was still [trying to find someone else to do the job].”

“Washer” had to have been the most nerve-wracking for McMahan. His performance is incredibly naked, its awkwardness only enhancing its honesty. Yet Pajo says the performance is a quintessential example of McMahan’s exacting nature. Though no one in the band had heard him sing the song before, that didn’t mean he hadn’t rehearsed obsessively. “He was actually really deliberate about the way he phrased everything [on “Washer”], even which verses to pull back on. That’s where he’s a genius. He knows how to get a lot of drama out of a performance. He wrote these amazing lyrics and then he was able to present them in a way that got the most emotion out of it.”

For anyone who knew Slint already, “Washer” was shocking. Quiet, dramatic, sensitive, gut-wrenching — none of these adjectives described the Slint that had existed from 1986 to mid 1990. The song is the most explicit distillation of what Slint had become.
Spiderland
was an album to be reckoned with. In its preparation, composition, production, and performance,
Spiderland
was an astonishing departure from
Tweez
— not to mention a departure from the sound
any
of Slint’s peers were making at the time. In two weekends, Slint had unknowingly made a record whose reverberations are still being felt today.

Spiderland
’s legacy will forever be linked to its dynamics. Although the shift from quiet to loud passages can be traced back to rock’s earliest days (never mind classical, opera, gospel, Broadway, and blues), Slint may have been the first to make the tactic explicit — to play
really
quiet, then
really
loud — and to make it doubly pronounced by using the same exaggerated juxtapositions on almost every song in the course of one album. Rock bands of every era utilized dynamic changes: the Beatles dropped “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” into the middle of
Abbey Road
; the Velvet Underground closed out
Loaded
with the slow-building “O! Sweet Nuthin’”; psychedelic acts like Pink Floyd and the 13th Floor Elevators bounded from simmering looniness to balls-out crazy; Joy Division, Wire, and the Fall all employed dramatic breakdowns against their usual post-punk paces; Talk Talk’s
Spirit of Eden
, released in 1988 and considered another early
landmark of the post-rock genre, resembles
Spiderland
in some ways thanks to its atmospherics, slow builds, and occasional bursts into high volume. Even contemporaries of Slint, like Bitch Magnet or Codeine or Galaxie 500, experimented with turning the volume way down in the context of punk rock.
¹
Yet
Spiderland
somehow makes its use of dynamics feel new, making it a kind of calling card for the band. Twenty years later, any band that makes a pronounced shift from spare to discordant passages in the space of one track runs the risk of being dubbed “Slinty.”

To describe
Spiderland
in such terms, however, risks the implication that the album is formulaic, which it certainly isn’t. Sloughing off Slint as a band that gets “quiet, then loud” paves over the sophistication of their arrangements. The band employed a number of subtle tools and tricks on each of
Spiderland
’s six songs, all of which enhanced the large-scale drama and
small-scale nuances. “Quiet, then loud” could not be more limiting in its description.
Spiderland
is (roughly in order) innocent, soaring, creepy, disorienting, tense, maddening, lush, harrowing, somber, ominous, surging, and desperate. In other words, for all the manner in which Slint travel from quiet to loud and back again, they never really do it the same way twice. A closer look at how Slint treated their dynamics gives some insight into why
Spiderland
has endured as an influential album while so many Slint-like also-rans, many of whom simply played “quiet, then loud,” have faded away.

No song on the album illustrates Slint’s dynamic legacy more literally than the opening track, “Breadcrumb Trail.” In the song McMahan narrates, in first person, the story of a visit to a carnival full of rides, games, and professional parlor tricksters. When the song’s protagonist enters the tent of a fortune-teller, he impulsively asks her if she’d like to ride a roller coaster instead. She agrees, and they share the thrill of the ride, clutching hands and screaming to each other as the car rockets up and down. When it’s over, they part ways.

The plot of “Breadcrumb Trail” follows a bell-like arc: peaceful and unassuming at the beginning and end (meeting and saying goodbye to the fortune-teller); charged and electric in the middle (riding the roller coaster together). Musically, the song’s structure mirrors the rising and falling action. It opens with a warm, almost nursery-rhyme-like riff while the protagonist
walks the midway, then explodes into a swinging middle section while the couple takes the thrill ride. Swooping in waltz time from a low D chord to a high-pitched zing a few octaves up, the guitars here literally take on the action of a roller coaster, crashing down and whisking up over and over. Punctuating the roller coaster ride is the song’s subplot — yes, it has a subplot — signaled by the music’s shift into a jagged stop-start riff in 5/4 that moves the action from the peak of the roller coaster to the ground, where a ticket-taker observes the other fairgoers as he exerts his control over the ride. The character adds a more menacing element to the story — he teases a sickened girl and tells her she must stay on the ride — though his presence ultimately amounts to nothing. When the couple exits the ride and returns to the ground, so too does the music return to its original innocent riff.

Though the ticket-taker is not terribly essential to the song’s story, his presence does underline the way McMahan and Walford wrote their lyrics in response to their arrangements. The characters and action in “Breadcrumb Trail” are married to their riffs with the attentiveness of a Broadway musical. The action on the roller coaster is confined to the “roller coaster riff”; the ticket-taker only appears in the “ticket-taker riff”; the protagonist and fortune-teller’s feet are on the ground only during the segment that opens and closes the song. Paired with its lyrics, the music of “Breadcrumb Trail” seems almost manipulative in the
ease with which it carries the listener from one part of the carnival to the other.

The direct connection between character or action and riff or song section shows up elsewhere on
Spiderland
as well. All of Slint’s songs were methodically honed as instrumentals, with the lyrics painted over top by McMahan and Walford well after the mood of the song was set. This is why the content of the lyrics might seem so rigidly pinned to the way the instruments interact with each other. You can imagine the thought occurring to McMahan or Walford, “Hey, the middle section of ‘Breadcrumb Trail’ swings up and down; let’s make the song about a roller coaster”; likewise the sinister sound of “Nosferatu Man,” the earliest developed song on the album, must have begged for a sinister story line. Decidedly darker both in its music and lyrical content, the song’s gothic imagery is accentuated by Pajo’s spindly lead motif which creeps over McMahan’s churning chords, mechanically rolling in time to Walford’s disorienting beat.

As with “Breadcrumb Trail,” the action of the story seems tailored to each riff. Vice versa, the music does its share of work in filling in the story’s details, such as in the first verse:

I live in a castle.

I am a prince.

On days I try

to please my queen.

The simple lines are notably free of adjectives; instead, all descriptive duties are left to the music. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with vampire stories fills in the details of what kind of castle this is — dreary, dark, foreboding — because the music has set the scene. Walford’s snapping snare propels the music forward while McMahan, Pajo, and Brashear each play mutated versions of the same riff — McMahan plays an ascending chord progression, Pajo descending, while Brashear picks at a higher note to add an eerie undertone to the guitars’ interlocking chords. Between every four spoken lines Pajo’s high-pitched lead enhances the chilling atmosphere with its distorting half-notes and bending strings.

As in “Breadcrumb Trail” the action and the characters seem tied to which riff is being played. Both verses depict a relatively static portrait of the prince and queen, inside their castle. With the shift to the chorus sections — loud, aggressive, more muscular than scary — so too does the scenery and character dynamic change. In these sections the prince is outside of his castle, caught up in a chase with a mortal girl, the queen nowhere to be seen. Meeting the girl in the first chorus, she is a trespasser on the castle grounds, frightened away by the prince:

Like a bat I flushed the girl

as I flew out my back door.

I came to no one no more —

she ran with no glances

and railed like a red coal train.

In contrast to the inert content of the verses, the chorus sections are all action, matching the ampedup music. He “flew”; she “ran with no glances” and “railed like a red coal train.” In the second chorus the tables are turned and the girl chases the prince away. The prince is “set in a whirl”; the girl “set[s] a fire burning” as the prince “railed on through the night.” The verbs in the chorus sections are more aggressive, the characters are moving at a clip. As the music shifts from quiet to loud, the lyrics also shift from static to active verbs.

“Nosferatu Man” contains probably the most rudimentary quiet verse / loud chorus on the album. On the heels of “Breadcrumb Trail,” it becomes apparent how this element of the band’s sound became synonymous with Slint-as-adjective. But at the same time “Nosferatu Man” feels less concerned with its juxtapositions and more focused on creating intensity through rhythm. The song is dizzying in its jumps from one time signature to the next. The first verse is in 5/4, followed by a pause in which Walford clicks a single bar in 3/4 before the band launches into a chorus in 6/4. They repeat this pattern for the second verse and chorus before moving to the bridge, where things get especially complicated. Story-wise the chase between the prince and the girl escalates into a cat-and-mouse
game. The music reflects this polyrhythmically as the band splices into two separate but simultaneous meters, in effect circling each other. Walford hunkers down into a quarter-note-based kick/snare rhythm while Pajo, McMahan, and Brashear play a series of triplets, floating in and out of phase with Walford, who occasionally adds an extra beat to keep things from spiraling into cacophony. They sync up again for a third verse in 5/4, in which the prince’s “teeth touched her skin,” then unravel again into an extended polyrhythmic bridge — this time evened out to stay locked into Walford’s steady quarter note — before Walford and Brashear return to the 6/4 chorus section while Pajo and McMahan continue to stab at their stop-start chords in three. The song finally concludes with the girl gone and the prince holding his dead queen. The band lands together on a final G chord, dangling ominously in the air as the prince remains alone.

One can look at the two halves of “Nosferatu Man” and see the two sides of Slint’s reverberating influence: the easy-to-duplicate dynamic back-and-forth of the first two and a half minutes, followed by an escalation to a level of musicianship that is the antithesis of indie or alternative rock’s roots in punk, a genre born from an embrace of attitude at the expense of technical skill.
Spiderland
is a fork in the road for the evolution of underground rock: an album that inspired countless kids previously weaned on the ethos that anyone can do it, made by a band of musicians who did it
better
.

While the rhythms on
Spiderland
don’t get any more complicated than the dazzling conclusion to “Nosferatu Man,” the band’s skill remains on display. This is especially apparent in the way that much of the rest of the album deviates from the template set by the opening pair of songs. “Don, Aman” is the most explicit departure. Where every other song on
Spiderland
is precisely composed, the entire band turning up and down like a machine, “Don” is rough and rushed. In the overall sequencing of the album, the foreboding tone of “Nosferatu Man” might be heard as a bridge from the niceties of “Breadcrumb Trail” to the alienation of “Don.” Closing out the first half of the album, “Don” is a pivot point away from the dramatic rises and falls and toward an interior-minded, self-conscious, depressed atmosphere. Though the song features no drums whatsoever, the spotlight here is almost entirely on Walford, who wrote the music and most of the lyrics.
²
Here the drummer, a driving songwriting force dating back to Maurice’s earliest days, finally steps away from his drum kit, taking up lead vocals as well as playing McMahan’s guitar. Pajo is the only other musician on the track, essentially following Walford’s lead.

Despite the skeletal nature of the song, it still contains no small amount of drama. Telling the story of a man
quietly suffering a paranoid panic attack while at a party, the song is a giant frayed nerve. Walford and Pajo play a halting, fragile guitar riff full of pauses and awkward phrasings as Don stands outside of a house, alone, kicking himself over something he’d said while inside. Unlike the prior two songs, which involve a cast of characters, Walford’s lyrics stick tightly to the psyche of a single man who is at odds with himself. Don is conflicted, and the drama of the song lies in his battle with himself, choosing at different times to conquer or embrace his self-hatred. Evoking this split in Don’s personality, Walford and Pajo’s guitars are mirrors of each other — literally, they are played like reflections. The tones of the guitars are in stark contrast to each other, one warm, one cold. Walford’s guitar is panned slightly toward the right in the mix, Pajo’s panned left. Additionally, Pajo hits every chord on the downstroke, Walford on the upstroke; you can hear the scrape of Walford’s fingers on his strings, while Pajo’s downward strum emphasizes the bassier element of the same chord.