slint -- _spiderland_: classic or dud

...but strangely, i'm still compelled to put it on fairly regularly.

will oldham is in the "quarry" bit on the dvd. he is wearing purple crocs.

sund4r way upthred

and there's something else to it at the root of my distaste for post- rock, something bigger, an emotional quality i have trouble articulating. in a weird way, despite its lesser attachment to pop song convention, the music strikes me as more "conventional" in a bad way on some level than the husker du or sonic youth that preceded it. i don't know how to put it any better right now. i'm still trying to figure it out since i really like a lot of classic postpunk and indie/alternative rock and even enjoyed a fair bit of emo and hardcore. i'm probably always harping on this but it's a sense of alienation from a culture and aesthetic tradition that i thought i could relate to at one point.

for some reason i never managed to hear slint during the late-90s post-rock boom even though i was all over everything else at the time and was fully aware of slint's reputation. so i'm only just now hearing spiderland. weirdly, after just the other week digging up an old june of 44 record and being kind of bored by its loping plodding austerity.

and what i notice on a first listen is just how little difference there was between that later stuff and this record. like, no one added much, no one took away much. there were variations in style, somewhat limited by faithfulness to the austerity of the original. so, like, the variants that were a bit more screamo. or a touch jazzier. and the variants that were ok with being more grandiose or romantic or whatever ended up sounding like mogwai or gybe! or whatever, also it seems by being ok with different rhythmic bases. and you can hear how suitable this base is for more metallic variants (it would be funny if the bosse-de-nage upthread went on to be the post-rock-black-metal bosse-de-nage!), where a thicker sound would sort of make good on the deadened chug.

but hearing the original, it makes it seem like there wasn't much there to begin with—that it wasn't as much of a fruitful template as a lot of the next ~15 years of imitators and indie rock followers supposed. else they wouldn't have ended up all sounding so much like 'museum rock' (bob standard upthread). they also seem kind of academic in that way, in the painters' sense of 'the radicals are holding their own exhibition to protest the academie'—of adhering to a standard of correctness subscribed to by a closed circle of authorities in which originality is controlled by a very strong sense of decorum. which is maybe what sund4r was feeling?

i wonder if this record is WAY different for people who heard it close to 1991 and imagine it in the context of the underground rock of the time?

you've only listened to it once?>?????

the basic idea is pretty obvious

try listening to it again

I'm obviously somewhat biased here, but I think there is a much stronger emotional core at the heart of Spiderland than there is in a lot of what would come later. I too was into all the post-rock stuff of the late 90s, most of which has not held up too well in retrospect. (I agree re June of 44, for instance.) But there is a world of difference between Slint and all the bands Slint influenced--not least being that those later bands were taking cues from a post-rock playbook that had not been written when Slint were making Spiderland. I think you're right that there was something almost rote about a lot of later bands' application of this style; but there was nothing at all rote about Slint doing it. I think if you are not sensing a difference between Slint and June of 44 (or Mogwai or whoever), then you should try sitting with Spiderland for more than one listen, ideally free of distraction. Even more ideal, but probably impossible by now, would be to listen to it without thinking about how your "supposed" to feel about it.

xp

oh God. "you're."

adhering to a standard of correctness subscribed to by a closed circle of authorities in which originality is controlled by a very strong sense of decorum

there is something to this. not as re: slint but other, later practitioners. It's vexing to me because I like music which does not do as much as you expect it to but there was a feeling of reserve as a safety from exposing one's gristle...

reserve as a way of keeping safe from etc etc i should have said

i agree it really needs to be heard in the context of what surrounded it actually. like in a playlist with whatever else was happening in 'alternative' at the time.

i do agree that it set a _lot_ of the template for would would come, so if you burned out on that, then this sounds less special.

but also it is way more heart on sleeve than lots of later stuff. rodan also feels that way to me now -- everyday world of bodies, which i remembered for the explosiveness i now notice more how emo it is.

one thing I have concluded is that it would be better as an instrumental. i think they should release an instrumental version.

no way

The pictures and stories that the music paints are better created by the listener's imagination, I find. Now that I think about it, it might actually be the vocals that are making me like this album less every subsequent listen.

Steve Albini also suggests that the vocals were ill-advised in the documentary, but he says he's glad he overcame that. It wasn't clear to me whether he came to appreciate the vocals or whether he's glad he didn't completely dismiss the album because of them.

i can hear the difference, arrogantly telling me to or suggesting that i listen again is pointless. i didn't say i wouldn't listen again. it's obviously a subtle record. and perceiving its emotional core obviously depends on getting familiar with those subtleties. but it seems like coming to see them is not going to change the world or anything.

i think your phrase 'supposed to feel' is a good one, scott. not so much in connection with the received critical wisdom, but with the record's peculiar emotional profile, which like i was saying about its musical aspects, i think it shares a lot with what came later. i would understand it in terms of feeling -this-, feeling this specific way that's expressed in this specific music, against an expectation of feeling other ways or against a proscription of feeling that way at all, of expressing it. at least that's how i understand the combination of austerity, moodiness, the specific contours, the quietness, etc. it seems like the criticism of that you could make, more on the basis of the imitators, is something like, yes, ok, but that abstracted angsty reverie is not as profound as you feel it to be. it's a thing. but.

for some reason i'm of a mind to listen to gastr del sol. different things, but their range was greater and their emotional texture more complicated.

Gastr on crookt, mirror repair and upgrade are p much my favorite US post rock.

Especially mirror repair, a perfect EP

used to love mirror repair, but it's not got much in common w/ spiderland

As much as I love this record, it doesn't exactly seem like something that each new generation discovers anew. Not that it matters.

really? wasn't the whole thing about this record that it sold steadily year after year?

I'll stick up for the vocals on this record as adding a crucial texture to the music. I see the argument against, say, "Washer," but the talking/whispering that's on most of the other tracks really adds a certain darkness to the songs, and makes them all the more disconcerting.

What exactly is the argument against Washer's vocals? I mean, I see that they're weak, but I feel that the weakness is completely justified in the songs mood. So much so that I didn't even notice that they were "techinically bad" until watching this documentary and hearing them outside the context of the album.

That being said, I think I might be a little too for weak vocals as a way to justify my own. I don't know.

Hey guys I still like A Minor Forest

Randy: yo, dawg, that was kinda pitchy
Brian: (quivering lip eyes brimming)
Randy: but it was the best performance we've seen all day, you're going on to boot camp w/ brian paulson !
AFTER THE BREAK
Paula: so who're you two?
Al Johnson: I'm Al
Jamie Stewart: and I'm Jamie
Paul: and whatchy'all gonna sing for us today?
Al: we're gonna do "it takes two"

Polvo did an album last year that was good

really? wasn't the whole thing about this record that it sold steadily year after year?

for a while, yeah. don't think that's really been true for a decade plus

I don't have any sales figures in this record, but decade-plus seems like a stretch in my experience. Definitely feel like this record was still "cool" and being discovered when I was in college in the mid 2000s. Maybe in 2006 it totally fell off the radar or something, but my guess is that any drop-off it had was more gradual than that

I mean, I'm sure it was at peak popularity around 1998, but it definitely had a certain cachet well after that.

xp I like Washer's vocals a lot, actually. I was just saying I could understand someone hearing them and not liking them, thinking they somehow subtracted from the mood. Whereas for all the other vocals, I actually have trouble grasping the argument that the album should have been instrumental.

in my experience Slint are still reasonably well known amongst kids who are into post-hardcore

idk why their exposure would have dropped dramatically during a decade when they reformed and played quite a few concerts and in some reasonable size venues if london is anything to go by

because someone is strawmanning

For the record, I don't actually think that its popularity did drop dramatically. I was just trying to point out that this was still treated as an important record by youngish people as late as 2006, and that the earlier argument about its popularity could only be remotely true if it had an unlikely steep drop-off in the middle of the last decade.

The cover photo was taken 24 years ago today.

oh i didn't mean you, intheblanks

when I went to see 'em in Louisville in 1990, they played the Spiderland shit, and "Washer" stood out for the milquetoast manner of the lyrics and BM's vox: me and my friends straight up laughed, under the impression that they were making fun of…someone? or a wimpy sensibility? the idea of folks obsessing over the lyrics "what do they mean/were they losing their minds"-style is one I can't relate to…those guys did not care about lyrics meaning anything in particular in my experience, although that might have changed for the Spiderland era…

their performances in 1987 were notable for the lack of singing: I think "don't worry about me, i've got a bed" etc etc was the only vocal on any of the songs; it's clear to me that voice/lyrix is completely inessential/incidental to Tweez: after watching the footage that's included in the box set over and over in 1987/1988, it was weird to buy the record two years later and hear these non-sequitors all over the songs…also, neither "Carol" nor "Rhoda" were part of the initial repertoire…

quite odd that Will O, who was best friends with those guys and obviously cares about words and singing, wasn't in the band in the first place. but then, it was Will's brother Ned, not will, that was in bands in the 80s; will did not perform as a musician per se until the 90s.

They said in the movie that they tried Will out but rejected him because he could barely play guitar.

What's the song playing over the end credits?

Is this it?

http://youtu.be/RaMTyEG2Zew

Yep, that's it, thanks! Fuck, what a great song.

Yeah King Kong are great

King Kong are definitely not great (not even good) but that is I believe the only song post-Tweez that has Ethan, Britt, Brian and David playing together.

quite odd that Will O, who was best friends with those guys and obviously cares about words and singing, wasn't in the band in the first place. but then, it was Will's brother Ned, not will, that was in bands in the 80s; will did not perform as a musician per se until the 90s.

― veronica moser, Tuesday, April 22, 2014 9:52 AM (1 hour ago)

At the time of Tweez, Will had already co-starred in Matewan and by Spiderland he had played Jessica McClure's father and worked on another Chris Cooper film and I'm pretty sure was living part-time in NYC and Hollywood so I don't think he was as involved in the Louisville scene as his brothers until after all that was over, whereupon he drafted Slint as his backing band.

Reference:

I am a cinematographer
I am a cinematographer
O, I am a cinematographer
O, I am a cinematographer

And I walked away from New York city
And I walked away from everything that's good
And I walked away from everything I leaned on
Only to find it's made of wood, made of wood

And I was a big ol' bear once
O, I was a big ol' bear once
O, I was a big ol' bear once
O, I was a big ol' bear once

And I walked away from California
And I walked away from everything that's shown
And I walked away from everything I lived for
Only to find everything had grown, everything had grown

Now, I am a cinematographer
O, I am a cinematographer
O, I am a cinematographer
O, I am a cinematographer

If you were alone
You could walk away from Louisville alone

a few other things:

Will asked not to be included in the film, but invested a lot of time and attention in the film being made and provided a lot of rare source material for Lance Bangs.

Not sure that Albini's sentiment is being taken away from the film is that Albini was disappointed in the vocals on first listened and quickly realized his mistake (uh... you have read his 1991 NME review by 2014 right?). Why so much stock is being weighted on his admitted mistaken brief first impression is weird imho.

i wonder if this record is WAY different for people who heard it close to 1991 and imagine it in the context of the underground rock of the time?

― j., Monday, April 21, 2014 2:03 PM (Yesterday)

yes, and I won't fall for your other trollbait comments, although I did find them funny!

man this thread revive is really bringing out the fmbb indie bro clods huh

have you listened to it again yet

also bringing out the guys who've found the 755th-most interesting way to say they've decided that post-rock is boring

it's hard for me to imagine what satisfaction you get from your belligerent, ungenerous posting style, waterface. i can only suppose that offline you masturbate compulsively but derive only grim intermittent pleasure from it.

how is me asking you to listen to something twice bellibgernts?

also i post one handed, fyi.