Slint, Tweez
Featured Album
Math rock v. 1.0; the sound of punk splitting open.
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 time spent listening to Kreator and Samhain.
There's a rich seam of aggressive perversity and scatological humor perched in the crannies of the songs; computerized voices snicker in-joke phrases ("snatch feast… tweezer fetish"), and at the time rumors abounded of toilet recordings being concealed within the mix. But much of the intricacy and beauty of these songs, their capricious switchbacks, distracted noodling and curious detail remains sui generis, at arms 'length even from the band's later work; Spiderland is soberer and more narrative, but it lacks the manic humor and balls-out heaviness going on here. Like the mysterious figure within the Saab parked on the cover, there's an implication of mystery and menace beneath tranquil suburban plenitude, but thankfully, Slint didn't spell anything out.
