Slint - Spiderland
It's hard to explain the appeal of Spiderland to someone who “doesn't get it.” What the hell, they might say, these cynical ones, it's just some guy talking over music that goes from soft to loud, soft to loud. Big whoop. They might even have the audacity to say that the pieces aren't musically interesting, that the chords sound detached from each other and don't create compelling tunes. Of course, the problem isn't that they don't get it, but that they assume there is something to get.
In fact, the only thing to get is nothing. And once you get nothing, you no longer have it. Nothing must be something to be understood. To understand nothing, something must come out of nothing. Something like Spiderland.
Spiderland is an object of massive appeal to the “record snob” because it is prototypical outsider music; it generates a creepy voyeuristic vibe and plays on futility, offering a series of rolling climaxes which bring nothing new, deliver no catharsis. In essence, it resonates with the void inside us. Those who are not completely jaded, or detached, or empty, who still have contorted belief structures jutting out of the void at obtuse angels, will resist this resonance. For those of us obsessed with staring into our own abyss the resonance is inevitable.
The aesthetics of Slint are not defeatist. They say we can move beyond, we can still provide singularities of style, here is the evidence. We respond in turn, by turning Slint into a template, and this is the sorry state we now find ourselves in. But we cannot blame Slint for post-rock, everything singular must be simulated until it is no longer so, this is the society which we live in, we are all complicit. Spiderland, then, is the ultimate narcissism, and the ultimate dissolution of the ego, and it sounds great. Great because it can lead you to every greater, dizzying heights, but not the heights of pleasure, not mental or physical orgasm, but to the pinnacles of self-pity, self-doubt, absurdity and anti-catharsis.
This review is deliberately pretentious because this record is deliberately pretentious. But pretension is not something to be feared! Only pretensions can keep music mentally titillating, before it simply becomes the beat to hump to. Music is quickly becoming more and more functional, but if we must allow this we must also force the functionality to serve on both fronts, cerebral and visceral! How can we achieve a state of post-tension without pretension? Slint extracts tension from pretension, and moves us ever closer, ever farther away, from the post.