SLINT - Spiderland LP

Highly recommended.

The music on the evocatively titled Spiderland is morose, drifting, yet is not too bashful to scatter and then web back together, nor to unsheathe and slash with a sudden railing into distortion. As I mentioned, there is enough here in the music to be a terrific album without the spoken word emulsified into it. Discordance flows into monotone so well you'd think that each instrument was manipulated by one arm of a multiple-armed demi-god, for it slides in the directions of the composition as if by a single mind. With the base tones of the guitars and the jazzy tickling of the drum kit, the artists paint for you a bleak landscape that Isaac Brock could only formulate in a long-forgotten dream. Sewn into this sound is the expert use of dynamics, which continues to make the music interesting as each five-minute-plus song spins on into the forty-minute total.