Slint's Spiderland (11 page)

These subtle, premeditated differences keep the two guitars from sounding like mere overdub. Often on recordings a guitarist might record the same part twice as a way of making the instrument sound thicker, meatier (similar to the way a singer like Elliott Smith might double-track his vocal to make his voice sound fuller). By playing the same part in two contrasting tones, separated in the mix, the notes specifically picked from opposing angles, Walford and Pajo effectively make the
music sound like a fractured version of what should be a singular, unified whole. It’s a perfect complement to poor, nervous Don, who manages to convince himself to return to the party.

When he re-enters the house the pace of the song, like his pulse, accelerates. As Walford describes Don’s hyper-sensitivity, the guitar strums quicken to a steady, anxious rhythm — a single chord, only the root note changing every two bars. The hypnotic high notes become tense, the shifting root note a tick-tocking paranoia. As Don’s silent panic becomes more and more acute, Pajo adds a few rhythmic, sharp harmonics, like tiny daggers stabbing at Don’s ego. Soon enough Don’s anxiety overtakes him and he once again ejects himself from the party, this time for good. As he gets into his car and drives wildly into the night, literally howling at the moon, Walford’s guitar tumbles into distortion to reflect Don’s unhinging.

This is hardly the towering dynamics of “Breadcrumb Trail” or the anguished climaxes of “Washer” or “Good Morning, Captain.” The upward shift here is clumsy, even weak. No bass or drums kick in to bring Don’s wild ride to an apex. You can practically hear Walford’s foot click on his distortion pedal, just a hair behind the beat, accentuating the awkwardness of the transition. And it doesn’t last. The song soon winds down, as if, like the car Don is driving, it has run out of gas. In the light of the morning, the guitars again unified yet distinct, Don has come to terms with himself: “In the
mirror, he saw his friend.” Were the song to end on this plodding riff, the guitars in quiet unison as Don reconciles his two sides, one might think that Don has seen the error of his self-loathing. But like a trick movie credit — “The end . . .
or is it?!
” — that maddening distorted guitar briefly fades in, then back out, leaving Don’s story open and unsettled.

Spiderland
is a tense album, and that is due in large part to the way Slint withhold one element or another during their louder moments, such as the clumsy and brief single-guitar outburst in “Don,” which makes the character’s alienation and impotence all the more deeply felt. “Washer,” which begins the album’s second half, is an even more compelling illustration of how such withholding dramatically increases the impact of its climax. Though the song may begin as a kind of lullaby, it unfolds as something altogether more tortured, eventually reaching a plateau as powerful and affecting as the more celebrated conclusion to “Good Morning, Captain.” The reason the song’s zenith is so visceral is because of the way its drama is earned. “Washer” attempts, three times, to reach some sort of sonic release, but it only succeeds once. Where a song like “Breadcrumb Trail” is a symbol of the ease with which a band can manipulate the dichotomy of quiet and loud — as easy as riding a rollercoaster up and down — “Washer” is the best example of why Slint transcended their dynamics. The band spends nearly seven minutes laying the groundwork for its eventual payoff.

“Washer” begins quietly — so quiet, in fact, you might not realize the band have even begun if your volume is not high enough. It’s an all-downstroke descending chord progression — a subtle bit of fore-shadowing for the song’s eventual climax, though at the start it seems to be played so casually you might think Pajo or McMahan were just noodling around waiting for the rest of the group to start up.

Twenty seconds in they do, as “Washer” announces
Spiderland
’s second half with a new lushness. Pajo and McMahan’s guitars intertwine in intricate, ringing arpeggios while Brashear’s minimalist bassline accentuates Walford’s sparse drumming. Though not without an underlying melancholy — there is a string of despair running from “Don” all the way to the end of the record — “Washer” feels warm. Following “Don”’s anxious strumming, the first few minutes of “Washer” are a welcome comfort. When McMahan’s voice comes in — singing, up high in the mix — “Washer” reveals itself as a totally different animal from
Spiderland
’s other tracks. Of the sixteen songs that Slint ever put to tape, “Washer” is the only one that features actual
singing
— tentative, naked, honest singing. McMahan’s high voice and sometimes awkward phrasing only adds to the intimacy. It doesn’t feel like a song the rest of us are supposed to hear.

All of the other songs on
Spiderland
are told, in a way, at arm’s length. Aside from the somnambulant instrumental “For Dinner . . .”, each of the other four
songs on the album feature vocals spoken like short stories, and most are in third person. Their fictional settings transform them into movie-like entertainments. “Nosferatu Man” and “Breadcrumb Trail” dazzle with their odd time signatures, “Good Morning, Captain” with its inspired arrangement. “Don, Aman”’s stripped down intensity is upsetting. “Washer,” by contrast, is played softly in 4/4 time with discernable verse sections in which McMahan sings lyrics rather than speaks sentences. Even the subject matter is comforting in its familiarity: How many songs in your collection are about losing love? How many are about vampires or shipwrecks?

Slint use this familiarity to their advantage, lulling the listener with a prettiness heretofore unheard on the album. Yet as the song progresses its dark edge is revealed; though the lyrics are often elliptical and vague, by song’s end “Washer” feels less about a lover skipping out in the dead of night (“fill your pockets with the dust of a memory / that rises from the shoes on my feet” is about the most poetic kiss-off I’ve ever heard), and more about suicide by sleeping pills. The gravity of the situation seems to increase with each verse — the first two about a lover walking boldly into the darkness; the third, told from the partner’s perspective, a desperate plea (“please, listen to me / don’t let go”); and the final verse the lover’s acceptance of his fate (“I’m too tired now / embracing thoughts / of tonight’s / dreamless sleep”).

The music of “Washer” teases out the drama by dropping into a series of builds with each passing verse, each more emphatic than the last yet denying a crescendo. By contrast, McMahan’s vocal delivery seems to get quieter as the song goes on. His performance is perfectly attuned to the content of his lyrics. The first two verses are sung with some level of conviction — he enunciates every word, singing at an intelligible volume. His lyrics are brave — “I know it’s dark outside / don’t be afraid / every time I ever cried for fear / was just a mistake that I made.” Meanwhile the music of “Washer,” up to this point, has been fairly straightforward. Pajo and McMahan’s intertweaving arpeggios, a mixture of romance and melancholy, have been the definitive musical element. For the first three and a half minutes of the song, it’s the only significant riff other than the near-silent introduction and a few simple chords letting McMahan’s voice carry each verse. The song retains a simple pattern — riff/verse/riff/verse/riff — through the tail of the second verse, at which point the music shifts to reflect the increasing gravity of the story. Walford switches to his toms, creating a rolling tension as Brashear, Pajo, and McMahan each begin a slow build. But this rising wave dissipates before it can crash, morphing into another entwined riff — one guitar picking a complicated arpeggio while the other drops in a few well-placed chords, Brashear pushing things along as he slides up and down the neck of his bass. The new riff lasts just two bars before returning to the original anchoring arpeggio.

The third verse, a plea from the partner’s perspective, is sung with more desperation. Its first word —
please
— barely a whisper, and the rest of the verse only slightly more audible than that. For the first time in the song there is a real inkling of finality. Where in the first verse McMahan sings “I won’t be back here / though we may meet again,” here the partner’s words are more fatalistic: “promise me the sun will rise again.” McMahan’s voice by now is weak, absolutely without strength, as if the partner lacks any belief that the promise could be fulfilled. Through his change in inflection, McMahan has tapped into the despair that has underlined the song from the start.

As if in answer to the newfound tone of finality in the lyrics, the music becomes more intent. Where each of the first two verses landed on the cushion of the song’s main riff, the third, with urgency, falls right into the darker riff introduced earlier, in which one guitar plays an arpeggio while the other punctuates with chords; this time the second guitar plays with more insistence, while Walford’s kick drum gains prominence in the mix. This subtle change adds a layer of fatalism — there is no going back. We march forward. As the guitar playing the more complicated part changes back to the song’s main riff — as if trying to steer back to safer waters — the second guitar, bass, and drums continue their march. Then, for the second time, the music drops into near silence, steadily building toward a climax, rising higher than before — only
to be squelched by two sharp hits from Walford’s snare, like a slamming door.

The snare pushes everything to silence as McMahan utters the final verse:

I’m too tired now

Embracing thoughts

Of tonight’s

Dreamless sleep

My head is empty

My toes are warm

I am safe

From harm.

Again McMahan’s performance is a deliberate reflection of the action. Gone is the boldness of the first two verses. His voice becomes weaker, his phrases more elongated. McMahan literally sings as if he’s fighting sleep; you can hear the lover’s pauses as he trickles out the words “Embracing thoughts . . . of tonight’s . . . dreamless sleep.” That last phrase is, obviously by now, yet another indication that the sun, in fact, will not rise again. Lyrically McMahan connects back to the fearlessness described in the second verse. He knows it’s dark, he is not afraid. Passing from life to death, he feels safe from harm. McMahan holds the note of the last word — literally, the lover’s last word — and then, midway through the hold, drops in an overdub of himself singing that word again, to ghostly effect.

Underneath McMahan’s words, the band plays the original descending chord progression that began the song. At first they play it so quietly that you might think McMahan was singing a cappella — but over the course of the forty seconds it takes for McMahan to sing the last verse, the progression gradually intensifies. As McMahan’s final word reverberates the build increases more and more until finally —
finally
— “Washer” hits its crescendo. The band is at full roar as Pajo’s lead guitar lets out an anguished wail — it could not be a more visceral embodiment of grief.

By now the truly epic nature of
Spiderland
is apparent. But this is not accomplished solely by “Washer”’s traumatic climax. The overall pacing of the album is a display of Slint’s grasp of dynamics on a macro scale. The CD issue of
Spiderland
contains the message “This album was meant to be listened to on vinyl.” Surely it’s a statement of the band’s audiophile nature, but it also speaks to the composition of the six tracks.
Spiderland
was devised as two halves. Side A is a descent from the top of the rollercoaster in “Breadcrumb Trail” to the depths of Don’s depression. From this rock bottom, the second side rises dramatically with “Washer,” which concludes with one of the album’s highest peaks. Yet just as the individual songs need their quiet moments to enhance the drama of the loud, so too do the album’s peaks need their valleys. The quiet simplicity of the instrumental “For Dinner . . .”, in contrast to the rest of the record, makes it an all the more essential track.

“For Dinner . . .” is sandwiched between
Spiderland
’s two most dramatic songs, giving the listener a needed mourning period following from “Washer”’s conclusion and the chance to regroup before the album’s grand finale still to come. In some ways it feels like a connecting thread between the two songs. The rising and releasing builds resemble the three builds in “Washer,” while the steady pace of the guitar strums match the intro to “Good Morning, Captain.” It is the shortest and simplest song on the album, and also the most elegant. For five minutes the track ebbs and flows, a series of softly rising builds that evaporate before they can release. The song is the low tide to the rest of
Spiderland
’s tsunami waves.

The constant waxing and waning of “For Dinner . . .” is more than a mere holding pattern. It is also a subtle take by the band on
Spiderland
’s most defining element, its dynamics. “For Dinner . . .” is dynamic in its own right, actually containing more ups and downs than any other track on the album — the only difference being the short journey from the quietest moments to the loudest. It’s not the stark juxtaposition of whispering and shouting, but rather the dramatic distance between a breath and a sigh.

Brashear’s lulling bass, a constant picking of one note at low volume kept in time by a simple hi-hat count from Walford, acts as the baseline (excuse the pun) from which the action of the song constantly rises and returns. From this zero point the song swells
nine times in five minutes. The first build, and another near the two-minute mark, rise a little higher and last a little longer than the rest in the first half of the song. The others are short inhalations, each building for a few seconds but always receding back to the baseline. At the midpoint of the song, following one of these soft swells, the band drifts below the zero point to near silence, then builds up to the most jarring point — a terse punch of chords that abruptly end, only for the band to once again start back at equilibrium. Another soft build and return follows, and finally the volume rises again, a single, bright major chord that the band plays repeatedly for the final minute of the song. If “For Dinner . . .” has the rising and falling rhythm of someone fast asleep, then the last sixty seconds are the sound of awakening, the filling of one’s lungs with new air. This last minute is
Spiderland
’s most serene moment — a hopeful conclusion in contrast to the hanging chord of “Nosferatu Man,” the lurking distortion of “Don, Aman,” the traumatic climax of “Washer,” the anguished screams of “Good Morning, Captain.”