Slint's Spiderland - A Dark Journey Within
Slint's Spiderland
The whole album is strange, for one. The use of weird time signatures, along with the alternatively soft or shouted vocals and the way in which the instruments blend into a bleak soundscape, leave an eerie feeling, a sound that gets under your skin. The lyrics are what true emo should be, not “my boyfriend left me I’m so sad”, but rather an exploration of loneliness, heartache, and tragedy.
Breadcrumb Trail starts off Spiderland very well, with a visit to a carnival. It starts off innocently enough. But this is like visiting the carnival as a depressed child, filled with worries and anxieties. There are weird clowns, killer roller coasters, paedophilic carnies. It’s like every bad carnival experience you could have as a child wrapped into one song.
Nosferatu Man hardly has a better tone. Dealing with medieval queens and the like, its chirping guitar solos will cut through your ears, and the grindcore-esque riffs are numbing.
Don, Aman is welcome relief, a sparse guitar-vocals only song, until the creepy atmosphere grabs hold. You could almost describe it as the morning after a mass murder.
Washer is the first epic song in Spiderland, at nearly 9 minutes long. Different from the first three songs, it’s relatively sedate and melancholic in its nature. It strikes me as having a nautical flavouring, as the guitars seem to wash over in waves. The next song, For Dinner, is a quiet instrumental that flows on from Washer, and becomes the proverbial quiet before the storm.
Good Morning Captain is the master work of the album, a tale of a shipwrecked sea captain stranded on an abandoned outpost. It just builds and builds, until it reaches its climax, which is easily one of the most emotional ends to a song I’ve ever heard. As the visceral scream of “I miss you” is howled, you can’t help but feel shivers. It is the epitome of the album, and a fantastic conclusion to what I would consider one of the greatest albums ever.
Even if you think you dislike post-rock, math rock or emo, go out and buy this now. It doesn’t force itself upon you, it asks you to invite it in. And when you do, you won’t regret it.
