#1
Artist: Slint
Album: Spiderland
Year of Release: 1991
Label: Touch & Go
I could go into great detail of why Spiderland is the final entry in this little project. But instead I will simply note that I am writing this piece while connected to a wifi network named for this album. The waves from "Spiderland" are literally pulsing through my body as I type this. I am connected. I am secured. There is no other choice.
I recently watched Breadcrumb Trail, Lance Bangs' documentary about Slint. The film is a brisk journey that lasts just over an hour and a half, which taken by itself seems unremarkable. But then you consider the even more fleeting nature of the band's recorded output (their two albums and one EP amount to about 80 minutes of music). In this way, Breadcrumb Trail literally expands the story of Slint. As such it is a necessary companion piece to Spiderland, which is both the swan song of a helplessly enigmatic band and the greatest album ever recorded.
The documentary itself is straightforward, relying mostly on interviews and archival footage. It's relatively short on specific details about the creation of the band's magnum opus, which is fine as the record speaks for itself. Instead, it emphasizes the personal journey of the band members and the context from which they arose. While the details of the 1980's punk/house/hardcore/indie scene in Louisville, Kentucky are a necessary portrait of a most peculiar milieu, it's the former aspect that makes Breadcrumb Trail essential. What the band's story specifically reveals is that the genesis of Spiderland was a paradox of sorts, a deliberate accident if you will. It's at once the logical result of great musical minds working in concert and an amazing instance of serendipity. It's simply put, a miracle.
The "deliberate" part of "deliberate accident" is not hard to articulate. The members of the band all had a drive to create at a young age and started playing music together in various iterations in their early teens. Britt Walford and Brian McMahan teamed up in the most notable such precursor, Squirrel Bait. The documentary describes that band's sound as "ironic hardcore," which begins to hint at the philosophy that Slint would later inhabit. Walford himself described the group as being "comfortable with each other," suggesting a natural resonance that brought out the best in everyone involved. And the process for actually bringing Spiderland to life is shown to be painstaking and purposeful. The details of five-day-a-week hours-long practices in the Walford family basement depict a band as committed to their craft as any. Through all of this, the band displays a combination of focused intensity and an utter lack of pretension that suggests the end result will be nothing short of brilliant.
And yet, Breadcrumb Trail seems to subtly make the case that some sort of cosmic entropy played just as large of a role in the creation of Spiderland. Every step throughout the band's journey feels tenuous and appears to happen almost by luck (all the band members participate in the doc, but they're all interviewed separately and appear to be slightly coy with the truth, adding to the mystique). Ethan Buckler, the group's first bassist, left before Spiderland primarily because he clashed with Steve Albini during the recording of their first album, Tweez. The other band members appear to make decisions at random as well (Britt Walford in particular appears to be an inscrutable individual). Spiderland's producer Brian Paulson remarks that he arrived just in time for the recording session and didn't have much of an idea how it would go. And then there's the matter of the record's lyrics. What appears to be a pitch-perfect accompaniment to Slint's hushed and twisting compositions is much more happenstance than one would expect. The basement practice sessions reveal that Slint never wrote lyrics until they were physically in the studio. The life-changing brilliance of phrases like "Don stepped outside..." and so many others represents not a planned artistic statement but rather a fleeting moment of transcendence.
Where does this leave us? Spiderland is as clear of a musical statement as there is, but does the band even know what that statement is? The album is clearly the work of a precise and exacting set of minds and yet its very existence is dependent on so much randomness that even now it feels precarious. If a butterfly flaps its wings, will it go away? Does it even exist? Maybe I'm the one visiting the fortune teller in "Breadcrumb Trail." Wouldn't be the weirdest possible thing.
In the end, Spiderland is the musical equivalent of an inherent contradiction. A surface-level description of its contents would lead anyone to dismiss it out of hand, but that's only because there's nothing like it. Because something like it could only happen if everything goes right. And as of today, everything has gone right only once.
