The thing with this album is that I wish, really wish, that I’d come to this album on time. When it first hit. How could I though, I was eleven and an eleven year old kid wouldn’t really have a clue what it is – hell, a lot of the thirty year old kids I know would still get baffled by it.
The reason I wish I came to this when it dropped is because it clearly had an impact. So many of the bands that sit in both my album collection and this list have the effects of this slab of genius in their works.
From the discordant guitars, vocals that are in one song mere spoken word and another screamed out, the intensity of the playing, the diverse and then-uncommon approaches to volume and tempo… not only are these things apparant in records from The Shipping News, Godspeed… Sigur Ros, Early Day Miners…. but these are things I now actively search for in new music whether it’s the latest album from Sonic Youth or when my band gets together and I try pulling some tortured lines from my own guitar.
The songs are strange beasts – the lyrics are at odds with the music but the whole package is so damn hypnotising I cannot hit the skip button. There’s mumbled songs, screamed songs, fractured beats and droning guitars and the urgency of it – the mere half a dozen songs are finished in around forty minutes – is such that it’s still playing in my ears long after the album is finished.
I can’t pick out one stand alone track because that would be to separate the impact of the whole. It’s true that this album suffers from an awful lot of hype. People that work in record shops and spend all day drooling over post-rock vinyl will talk of it in a tone reserved for holy grail’s as phrases like “Will Oldham took the cover photo” and ”David Pajo was in Tortoise when they made Millions Living…”. Even that cover photo – the band swimming in water, bodies submerged and black white – has been attributed as mysterious and symbolic.
To that end it suffers a blow as nothing could really live up to so much hype. It is, after all, four guys that happened to make a cracker of an album that would inspire many, many other people. Just a shame that there can be a fair bit of pretension among devotees of the genre that puts things up on a pedestal. However, that cannot change the fact that, in Slint’s Spiderland, the genesis of all the things that would make future albums my favourites can be found.
Check out:


