Recorded music
Spiderland
Review of Scott Tennent’s Slint’s Spiderland
Spiderland is one of those records that blew the lid off what I thought was possible within rock music.
It also hit me at a time and place where I was ripe for its influence, a post-adolescent pupae still forming an identity and an aesthetic.
It’s strange, the resonance this album has been able to create for so many people.
It was recorded in two weekends, the product of a year’s concentrated effort and five rehearsals a week by a group of music nerds barely out of childhood, who broke up before its release in March 1991.
The cover features four young men smiling at the camera in a black and white photograph taken in a lake in a quarry on the outskirts of Louisville, Kentucky, a rural city not unlike the one I grew up in — except a lot more plugged in to the 1980s independent music scene than was possible in Toowoomba, Queensland.
I was introduced to it in late 1991 by a girl I’d started seeing.
She had a record player in her bedroom, and we lay there listening to side 2 over and over:
‘Washer’, with its tentative vocals about a doomed relationship; ‘For Dinner …’, a brooding instrumental providing a space for calm; and the menacing storm of ‘Good…
