I first heard Slint late one Saturday night, in the late summer of 2005. I had returned from a night out, a smidgen worse for wear, and quickly took to bed, a seventeen-year-old more inclined towards listening to new music on my MP3 player than I was extending any semblance of well-meant debauchery into the early hours of Sunday morning.
Listening on shuffle – drifting into the void – a voice whispered in my ear, “Don stepped outside...” Cold, clean guitar shapes, guided by introversion’s very own pace, formed around backwashed thoughts and skeletal arpeggios. The tale of a casualty of solipsism – Dostoyevsky’s Underground man in song – ‘Don, Aman’ by Slint proved an immediate revelation.
I started, propped up and listened to the track three more times. Before I knew it, it was 5am, light crept through the corners of my bedroom window and the sound of waking birds outside blended with the ambience of the album's quieter passages. I had discovered Spiderland.
Released in 1991, Spiderland is the second and final record by the aforementioned Louisville quartet. Having split immediately after its now mythical recording, immersed in cruel obscurity, its conjurers reformed back in 2005, 2007 and once again late last year, all but servants to the six-track album’s posthumous repute and ever-increasing cult status.
The follow-up to their (albeit impressively) slapdash, Steve Albini-produced debut, Tweez, it's safe to say Spiderland is a deeply personal listen; a bona fide "headphones at night" album that weaves a dreamlike web of sparse, inward-looking textures, fist-clenched, harmonic-driven crescendos, masterfully stalking rhythms and an air of ineffable existential dread that evokes very few comparisons, before or since. The very fact that these songs were written by four unknown musicians barely out of their teens remains nothing short of extraordinary.
A couple of months ago, myself and Michael McKeegan of Therapy? were idly chatting and the subject of Slint came up. Smiling, he said something that holds some weight: "I love Slint but I can't stand Slint fans." Although uttered a little tongue-in-cheek, his words actually rang pretty true. Slint diehards can be pretty insufferable, their unwavering allegiance to what non-fans must first find intriguing, and latterly irksome, a thing of legend.
Indeed, having also spoken to David Pajo, Britt Walford and Brian McMahan from the band about the whole "Slint fan" thing, they all individually share the opinion that it's something of a odd phenomenon. Britt figured, "It's cool, I guess," scratching his head, reaching for another cigarette outside Dublin's Tripod in 2007, David Pajo said, "Honestly – I always assumed I would always be the only Slint fan" and Brian McMahan, speaking of Spiderland, "Man, it's also just an album... you know?"
Where a younger me may have found their perplexity a tad unpleasant, with age comes a sense of perspective about the whole thing. Whilst Slint are an exceptional (and exceptionally influential) band and Spiderland remains one of the greatest rock albums of all time, I'm personally glad to have moved beyond the blind, obsessive adulation of my University years; getting on and off trains, entering lecture halls and leaving the Student Union bar blaring Nosferatu Man or the band's greatest recorded moment, Good Morning, Captain, somehow convinced I was privy to a sort of inner secret.
Of course, this was always a secondary (and subconscious) preoccupation beyond simply loving the music but I've since become very aware that Slint are worth much more than entertaining their apocryphal, "mysterious" repute.
Nine years on from that happily sleepless morning in 2005, Slint are set to make their long-awaited Belfast debut in the intimate surroundings of Limelight 2 AKA "the old Limelight" on Monday 18 August. With a new deluxe reissue of Spiderland stoking the flames of their current incarnation, now is as good an opportunity as ever to catch them recreate the precise, paced and introspected majesty of their music.
Aside from myself, there will be the diehards still in the throes of obsession, those who have long passed beyond it, the myopic but tasteful students of Pitchfork, the curious, expectant onlookers, those that couldn't afford flights and a ticket to Primavera, and the uncertain newcomers dragged along by their insistent friends. Pop along - it might just change your life.
Brian Coney
