Unfairly overshadowed by the majestic, melancholic expanses of their masterpiece, Spiderland, Slint's debut album remains to this day wonderfully recalcitrant and improbable. This is, after all, the sound of heavy metal and punk rock kids from Kentucky going to Chicago to make a "jazz-fusion" (not really) record with a fancy-pants producer at the end of the '80s. It should have been horrible. Instead, you could call 1989, when this LP first appeared on Jennifer Hartman Records, yet another candidate for "the year punk broke": Listen closely for the sound of the rigid shell of shouty anti-authoritarian tantrums cracking open, and a runny goo of perverse, liquid musicality spilling forth. (In a tellingly twisted move, the fancy-pants producer in question, Steve Albini, was demoted in the liner notes to "some fuckin 'derd niffer.")

Before their muscular drumming, wide vistas of hushed silence and mastery of soft/loud dynamics had been photocopied and metabolized into post-rock clichés by overeager admirers, it was easier to make out the punk and metal DNA tightly coiled inside the music: Brian McMahan's sore-throat screaming on "Carol" bespeaks his tenure in Louisville's hardcore legends Squirrel Bait, while Dave Pajo's crack-of-doom riff on "Charlotte" bears witness to unhealthy amounts of… read more »