Tonight’s selections from Slint’s hugely influential second album, 1991’s Spiderland.
Few folkloric mysteries are quite as eerie as that of a ghost ship. When a ship’s complement goes missing, there’s usually only one direction they could have gone, but something about an empty ship adrift in open waters feels more strangely chilling than the typical whodunit. When there’s nothing but ocean in any direction, the prospects feel particularly grim.
Slint‘s Spiderland is a ghost ship in the form of a rock album (or a post-rock album if such distinctions are necessary), a hollow vessel coasting forward long after the band that made it faded into the background. Not that they literally disappeared—most of the band’s members all went on to make music, David Pajo in particular having a prolific career in a number of different bands and solo projects. Yet the myth of Spiderland, over time, became bigger than the band. In fact, Slint broke up shortly after its release, having played only a few dozen shows, and the weird, haunting music they created on this second and final document as a band created outlandish legends in the absence of any real information—that the making of the album resulted in everyone in the band being institutionalized. There was another, even less credible story, about the members of the band dying in a car accident, but that one was pretty easy to debunk, seeing as how they’re all still alive. The lore about Spiderland is scary campfire story fare, the kind of strange legend that only exists when a band doesn’t bother to make the effort to ruin the mystique. — Treblezine
Breadcrumb Trail
It would be hard to mistake “Breadcrumb Trail” — Spiderland’s eventual opener, with lyrics co-written by McMahan and Walford — for “just self-indulgent expression.” In an unaffected, almost casual voice, McMahan narrates the story of a man visiting a carnival. A fortune teller’s tent catches his eye, but once he’s inside, instead of having his fortune read, he asks the fortune teller “if she’d rather go on the roller coaster instead.” The words mirror the shifts in the music to gorgeous effect: Just as the pair are ascending for their first perilous drop, the band moves from clean-toned reverie to a washy, bottom-heavy roar, with Pajo’s distorted harmonics ringing out like bagpipes. As the narrator and the fortune teller give themselves over to the exhilaration of the ride, we cut to an omniscient view of the carnival, meeting a surly ticket-taker below, and a girl getting sick as she steps off the roller coaster. The tale ends on a sweet note: “At the gate, I said goodnight to the fortune teller/The carnival sign threw colored shadows on her face/But I could tell she was blushing.”
As they started working on lyrics for the album, McMahan says that he and Walford zeroed in on a coming-of-age theme, and “really simple, fairy-tale kind of imagery.” A carnival setting seemed like the perfect establishing shot, as it were. “It was an easy point of reference,” McMahan says. “Growing up, the Kentucky State Fair was a big deal. So some of that vibe of childish wonder and amusement had an actual basis in real life.” — Rolling Stone
Glenn
When Slint began working on the songs that would form Spiderland in 1989, the initial wave of post-hardcore indie rock was on the wane, with scene stalwarts either trading up (the major label-bound Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr.) or breaking up (Black Flag, Mission of Burma) or both (Hüsker Dü). Recorded by their friend Brian Paulson, Spiderland would forge a new indie-rock lexicon by applying hardcore’s emotional intensity to music that, formalistically speaking, was its complete inverse. Even in its heaviest moments, Spiderland wasn’t so much about rocking as stalking: Songs prowled instead of pummeled, with clean, glistening guitar lines (inspired by Pajo’s obsession with Minutemen’s D. Boon) accentuating lyrics that were muttered rather than screamed, all enhanced by a strategic use of space that meant the silences between the notes accumulated their own crushing weight. The album’s definitive bookend tracks—“Breadcrumb Trail” and “Good Morning, Captain”—don’t so much shift from quiet to loud as from bleak to blinding, with McMahan and Pajo emitting the sort of frequencies that make you cover your eyes instead of your ears. And when the band do encroach on something resembling conventional rock—like with the meaty, metallic, morse-code riffage of “Nosferatu Man”—it’s to a sadistic, merciless degree of excess, until you feel like the poor bastard in the movie Se7en whose stomach explodes after being force-fed too much spaghetti.
Spiderland’s volcanic outbursts naturally count as the album’s most bracing, memorable moments. The one drawback is that they occasionally obscured and overshadowed McMahan’s monologues, which remain eminently unnerving for both their delivery (not so much “spoken word” as melody-averse singing imbued with cold-blooded, dead-eyed dread) and their amazingly immersive economy. Even a simple opening line like “Don stepped outside” (from the distorto-folk centerpiece “Don, Aman”) instantly sets a vivid scene of simmering unease, of needing to escape from some stifling, suffocating situation; the devastatingly melancholic “Washer” scans as a break-up ballad, but could also very well be the prelude to a murder-suicide. [...] Back on Tweez’s “Carol,” Slint hinted at the darkness lurking in the backwoods of suburbia “past where they paint the houses”; forsaking its predecessor’s inside jokes for outsized drama, Spiderland ventures past that point of no return where the mundane turns horrific, with songs of vampiric lust and county-fair roller-coaster rides and boat trips gone terribly wrong. When Slint do inevitably unleash the noise, it’s less a sonic device than a narrative one, to mark the moment after which, for the songs’ protagonists, nothing will ever be the same again. — Pitchfork
Good Morning, Captain
“Good Morning, Captain” really ties up the coming-of-age narrative that appears in a couple of the tracks on the album. Through the metaphor of a sea captain who is the only one left after a brutal storm, Brian McMahan aims to express the feeling of loss when transitioning to adulthood and saying goodbye to adolescence. While almost all of the songs before this one strongly have a sense of youth, this is the conclusion to that. It even utilizes the ship motif that also appears in the opening song “Breadcrumb Trail” in the line “Scattered remnants of the ship could be seen in the distance.” The idea of growing up and leaving things behind is even literally affirmed toward the end of the track when McMahan says, “I miss you/ I’ve grown taller now.”
There is even a tie between the sense of isolation that appears in “Don, Aman.” “‘I’m the only one left/ The storm took them all.’” While our narrator is still clinging so desperately to childhood and not wanting to let go of all of these things he’s held dear to him, his friends have already moved on. He is the last one on the shore.
“The captain reached for something to hold on to/ ‘Help me,’ he whispered, as he rose slowly to his feet/ The boy’s face went pale/ He recognized the sound.” This line is incredibly intriguing because of the different ways it can be interpreted. At first glance, you could suggest that the captain is trying to reach out to his youth represented by the boy but it denies him that pleasure because he has already been too tarnished to return. This is also reminiscent of the theme of the idea that knowledge comes with a nihilism or cynical view which we’ve seen in “Don, Aman” when our narrator solidifies his loneliness choosing then on to reject society. On the other hand, McMahan brings up that the following verse is actually about his little brother. It’s an apology for leaving him behind to grow up in Louisville and experience the same tough coming-of-age that McMahan did. The boy could also be a representation of a festering fear of losing his younger brother or even just the idea that he has left him and can’t undo that fact. This apology is evocative and chilling. “I’m sorry, I miss you.” — The Pigeon Press
Don, Aman
In March 1991, Melody Maker printed an album review written by Steve Albini – at the time best known as the former frontman of Chicago noise trio Big Black, though gaining recognition for his work recording other bands. He was writing about the second album by a little known band from Louisville, Kentucky, whose first record he had recorded. He was unequivocal about Spiderland, by Slint. "It's an amazing record," he wrote, "and no one still capable of being moved by rock music should miss it. In 10 years' time, it will be a landmark and you'll have to scramble to buy a copy then. Beat the rush."
Today, Slint's guitarist, David Pajo, remembers hearing the same thing firsthand, in Albini's house. "He said: 'I don't think you guys will ever get big, but you'll be really influential. I was thinking: 'You're fucking crazy.'"
In fact, although it sold fewer than 5,000 copies at the time, Spiderland did become a landmark, one that invented an entire genre – post-rock. Generations have grown up in awe of its shifting landscapes, sinister narratives and intangible, dark power, and Slint have become modern rock's Velvet Underground: a band who created a ripple that kept spreading, influencing bands from Mogwai to Sigur Rós.
"They cultivated this sort of psychic playing," says Mogwai's Stuart Braithwaite. "It's way above other bands and is really emotional. When I heard Spiderland, it was unlike anything I'd heard before. I still don't know if I've heard anything else like it, now."
The fact that Slint had split up before the album was released and given few interviews and played few gigs beyond Louisville imbued them with a powerful mystique. — The Guardian
Rhoda
.
WHO’S TALKING TO WHO?
Jimmy Kimmel: Jelly Roll, Brandon Lake
Jimmy Fallon: Michael B. Jordan, Ryan Coogler, Olivia Munn, Bon Iver, Wet Leg (R 4/2/25)
Stephen Colbert: Sen. Elizabeth Warren, St. Vincent, Evie McGee Colbert (R 4/16/25)
Seth Meyers: Walton Goggins, Sadie Sink, Rachel Kaly (R 4/8/25)
After Midnight: Sasheer Zamata, Greta Titelman, Jonah Ray (R 4/2/25)
Watch What Happens Live: Kristen Kish, Gail Simmons, Tom Colicchio
