649 Slint - Spiderland (1991)

Studio Album - Math Rock

About the Act:

Slint were a band from Kentucky, formed in 1986, they split just before their second album was released in 1990. They have had several reunions, but no more albums.

About the Album:

This was their second album, and was released just after they split. It had "critical success".

My History with this Album:

None

Review:

It's on the weird side. I have pasted in below my re-usable statement on musical weirdness. This was apparently a hugely influential album in the development of Math Rock, and that rings true to me. I have some exposure to Math Rock, because it's kind of connected in some way to Prog, and I listen to quite a bit of Prog. However, I'm not going to expound on it, because it's not that important in terms of what is this album like, and did I enjoy it.

There are two electric guitars, and an electric bass, and some drums. For the most part the two guitars use the same, clean guitar tone, and the bass tone is similar too. I think this is deliberate, and the instrument sounds stay pretty constant through the album. There are a lot of plucked chords and arpeggios, and I think the playing is probably best described as "patterns" - repeated lines and chords, not always of the same length for different instruments. These blend together with drum patterns also to give complex, intertwined music. Mostly this is fairly cis-harmonic (I have just invented that term to mean conventionally harmonic), but there is a good amount of discord as well, and complex rhythms. This makes the whole musical side of things very intellectual, and not really having a focus on "feel" rather than on "clever". And that's OK, like I said I listen to Prog, so I am used to clever. The approach is quite like King Crimson in their Discipline kind of era (but knowledge of that is somewhat specialised also). It also has the ponderousness of Doom Metal, although it not metal. Just ponderous, slow and slightly oppressive. It is not music for dancing to, or for whistling the tune of.

Vocals. Well there is some singing, but mostly there are mumbled narratives, to quiet to pick out easily. Apparently they are generally somewhat dystopian and depressed.

All in all, technically it's very competent. It has a particular atmosphere that some people will like, but the strangeness of it makes it pretty inaccessible to people who like music to be more or less musical. I liked it a bit.

6.9/10

Re-useable statement on musical weirdness:

Some music is weird. When I am reviewing something that is, I often feel the need to say the same things, and so, this re-useable statement is born.

Quality is a strange thing, whenever I try to get to grips with it, it fizzles away like mist. There are many different qualities we look for in music, some objective, but many are contextual. For music that steps outside the mainstream, an additional quality is added, that of subverting the form. From a pure skill perspective, some modern art paintings could be described as "a child could have painted this" - to which the presumed response could be "Exactly. Isn't that great?". Some of the most influential Avant Garde music deliberately demonstrates what stepping out of convention can sound like. Given the many dimensions of music (form, harmony, melody, rhythm, performance, lyrics, production, and probably more) there are many ways of stepping out of the circle of "normal".

This means that "being weird" can be an easy win. Sometimes unusual music is clearly highly skilled, sometimes it seems to reject the norms of skill also. Where is the boundary between bad and deliberately bad? Is there a boundary? Is it all about perception? Sometimes it seems like artists can do anything at all, and it will be accepted as ground-breakingly subversive, as long as the artist takes it incredibly seriously, almost making people applaud it by force of will. There is a dichotomy here, because in order to have acclaim, the music needs to be accessible enough to enough people to gain that acclaim, while the nature of "being weird" is, by its nature making it less accessible. 

There are some people who seem to deliberately embrace things that are difficult or inaccessible to others - and in music this can be the most challengingly unusual, loud, aggressive, sweary, or nice parts of music. I'm OK with this, but I struggle when they then give the impression that it makes them a connoisseur, a better listener than other people, because they "get" the weird music. I deplore this attitude, and don't think anybody should be looked down on because they don't like Frank Zappa, or Rammstein, or Henry Cow, or Patagonian Nose Flute music, or anything else for that matter. However, I'm not immune to this musical elitism, so if you really like Baby Shark, please don't tell me.

I have found that I like some unusual music, but not all, which makes me wonder what are the qualities I enjoy in the stuff I like. I have no clear answer to this, but I think I am more open to it being unusual if that is not all of the music, so unusual sections in the context of more "normal" music seems to impress me more. Maybe because it becomes clear that the musicians can play well.

At the end of the day, regardless of something being ground-breaking, challenging, subversive, ironic, clever, badly-recorded, experimental, deliberately tasteless or just aggressive, the bottom line is whether I enjoy listening to it. It's all about the listener experience.

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/2NnkLRaeX33d1Mn8ZLgTo8

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL866A9DEFD4645906

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiderland