Slint's Spiderland (6 page)

Not everyone hated it. Brashear was in the audience and was already a convert. He knew what to expect because he’d just seen them a month earlier opening for Killdozer at Tewligan’s Tavern, a legendary Louisville punk venue. Also in the audience at the Killdozer show was Pajo and Walford’s old bandmate, Rat. It was the one and only time he saw Slint play. “They sounded like Maurice without me yelling,” he told me. A homegrown, mostly hand-written, zine called
Conqueror Worm
published a review of the same show, also remarking that the band sounded like “a jazzy Maurice.” The same zine also contained reviews of the Big Black show and a battle of the bands show at St. Francis High School. For the latter it noted that it was the first time the band opted not to do “a Maurice opening for the first song,” indicating once more that Slint, at this early stage, was clearly an outgrowth from Walford and Pajo’s original band. Garrison, however, appreciated the differences. “It was better, because I wasn’t interfering with it. I wasn’t trying to caterwaul above it about whatever crazy Jesus/Satan shit I was thinking about — my urge to drown in a sea of my enemies’ blood or whatever. It was nice to have me removed from the equation, but at the same time I was like, ‘these poor fuckers, Jesus. This is not going to fly.’ It was like looking at the most beautiful ship you ever saw in your life, and knowing it was going to sink.”

Brashear, on the other hand, saw a band he wanted to follow. When he went to the Big Black show he
came armed with a four-track to record Slint’s set. A few months later, McMahan called him for a copy; he needed to use it as a demo over which he could practice vocals. Slint had set a date to go into Albini’s studio.

* * *

Thinking of Slint’s
Tweez
-era material as metal — perhaps more aptly
un
-metal or
anti
-metal — goes a long way toward making sense of their early sound. Recorded in the fall of 1987 by Steve Albini and released in 1989 on Jennifer Hartman Records and Tapes,
Tweez
has always sounded like an alien in the musical landscape. Even more than twenty years later it’s hard to find another album since that could be perceived as having a direct link to
Tweez
. Quite simply, it’s a fucking
weird
record. It’s even stranger when trying to connect its sound to
Spiderland
, released four years after the first album was finished — a lifetime for teenagers. There is a hint of things to come in songs like “Kent” or “Darlene” (each song is named for the four boys’ parents — and Walford’s dog, Rhoda), but in the context of the rest of
Tweez
that path is difficult to foretell.

So what
is
the proper context in which to understand
Tweez
? There are a few key ingredients — not least was Albini’s presence behind the boards and the young band’s general adoration of Big Black — but first and foremost
Tweez
is a record made by metalheads.
Recovering metalheads, perhaps, but metalheads nonetheless. Were you to re-sequence its nine songs so that the first half ran “Ron,” “Carol,” “Charlotte,” and “Warren,” the metal-ness of Slint would be more clearly telegraphed. Pajo’s virtuosic playing permeates the record, and especially these songs, as he hurls a torrent of pick-harmonics like a champion dart-thrower. “Ron” opens the record with a crushing riff built around a drop-D chord and a run of artificial harmonics. As Pajo’s guitar drifts into a sustained chord that melts into textural feedback, his hands move to the whammy bar for a little flare as the note fades out. During the verse Pajo shifts into a jazzy, note-filled riff punctuated with more pick-induced screams.

“Carol”’s opening riff is a revision of “Ron”’s — slower, more drawn out, but the same chord-plus-harmonic-run, set in a minor key. Albini does his best to distract from the metal sound by adding sounds of crashing noises and an exceptionally Big Black–like bass sound, but by the two-minute mark Pajo and Walford reassert themselves with a sinister circular rhythm played in half time. “Rhoda,” the last song on
Tweez
and also the last song the band wrote before hitting the studio, is the only track on the album that succeeds at being aggressive without being heavy. The song sees Pajo’s predilection toward artificial harmonics taken to the extreme, turning the technique into a series of riffs without ever descending to chunkier low-end chords as he does on the rest of the album. The sound of the
instrumental clearly appealed to the band as an avenue worth pursuing post-
Tweez
, as they re-recorded an extended version of the song two years later.

Also distracting from the at times brutal sounds of songs like “Carol” or “Charlotte” are McMahan’s lead vocals. Far more ingratiated in punk, McMahan didn’t sing with a hint of metal trappings. One could imagine Rat singing over “Charlotte”’s sludgy and dense percussive verse riffs, all shrieks and moans and howls, but McMahan had no interest in such theatrics. His vocal delivery throughout
Tweez
hews much closer to a hardcore bark.

That is, when he sings at all. Slint seemed clearly more interested in being an instrumental band from the start. McMahan only performs the duties of a frontman — singing lyrics that seem intentionally written and intended to be up in the mix — on three tracks (“Ron,” “Carol,” and “Charlotte”). The rest are either instrumental or feature spoken monologues or incidental voices recorded by Albini when the band wasn’t looking. Elsewhere McMahan steps aside, letting Buckler take the vocals on “Kent” and Edgar Blossom, of the band Flour, speak over on “Warren” (not that you could tell: Blossom’s voice is pitched down to half speed, rendering his lyrics almost unintelligible).

It’s decisions like these that keep
Tweez
from ever feeling too metal.
Tweez
is a fun, often surprising, record thanks to the band’s (and Albini’s) efforts to sidestep all the genre tropes that Maurice (metal)
or Squirrel Bait (punk) traded in. Part of how they accomplished this is that they
didn’t
sequence the record so that the heavier songs ran in succession. Instead, each is paired with a track comprised of all clean-tone guitars. Not necessarily “quiet” tracks, but more whimsical. Nowhere on
Tweez
do Slint employ the clear-cut dynamic juxtaposition of loud and quiet the way they would on much of
Spiderland
— most of the songs on
Tweez
are just a couple minutes long, getting across a single idea in one or two riffs and then done (“Ron,” for instance, is an intro, a verse, and an outro) — but you do begin to see the experiments in juxtaposition in the way the record is sequenced, and how that affects its overall pace and vibe. There is a fairly consistent ebb and flow to the album, from the aggressive to the ponderous and back again.

Tweez
is a record made by young kids who seem to be simultaneously running toward and away from the sounds of their record collections. McMahan and Pajo were both using EMG pickups in their guitars — a standard feature for guitarists in bands like Megadeth, Anthrax, and other metal gods of the ’80s, but not so in vogue among the Gibson- or Fender-wielding punks and indie pioneers. Walford meanwhile played Samhain’s
Initium
for Albini as an example of the drum sound he was going for. (Albini declined to accommodate the request.) At the same time, the band lionized bands like the Minutemen, the Meat Puppets, and especially Big Black; and they made a concerted effort,
regardless of their equipment, to try and find a sound that nodded in that direction.

In making
Tweez
, they managed to accomplish this in a couple ways — the first and most obvious being the choice of Steve Albini as producer. Most of Albini’s seminal production jobs — roughly everything that wasn’t his own band’s output — were still ahead of him at this point, though his reputation as an engineer still preceded him even in 1987. (For context, Pixies’
Surfer Rosa
was recorded a few months after
Tweez
.) As Ethan Buckler would later put it, “Slint went to Chicago [and] got Albini-ized.” That is: a razor-sharp guitar sound — less heavy metal than crackling aluminum — a well-defined but dirty bass sound, beautifully rendered drums, and vocals mixed in at equal (or lower) volume in relation to the music. While the phrase “Albini-ized” has a tacit meaning to anyone who listened to indie rock in the ’90s and beyond, it couldn’t have necessarily loomed as an expectation in 1987. Still, by the time he was done with Slint there were plenty of sonic similarities to Big Black or Albini’s new band, Rapeman. Much of Albini’s early work can sound tinny and cold; it’s an aesthetic choice, not a flaw — unless you’re Ethan Buckler and you feel a record without mid-range is excuse enough for quitting a band.

In fact it’s not that terrible a reason. (And in fairness to Buckler, he was also ultimately drawn to a completely different style of music, pursuing a more danceable, light-hearted muse with King Kong, who
have numerous records out on the Drag City label.)
Tweez
is a very odd-sounding record that takes a lot of getting used to, and half the reason for that is Albini’s production. His influence on
Tweez
stretches beyond his abilities behind the boards, despite his claims elsewhere that the final version of the record is not far removed from the demo the band sent to him prior to their session. “We all looked up to Steve a lot,” Pajo told me. “We were huge Big Black fans. When we went up there we wanted to let Steve do whatever he wanted. We were open to experimenting and trying everything. . . . The songs became, for better or worse, almost a backdrop for some of the production effects we were doing for fun.” One such example is the way they recorded McMahan’s vocals on “Ron”: “We had two mics swinging back and forth — Brian would have to keep pushing them as he sang — so they were going in and out of phase. We were up for trying any weird recording technique. We wanted to collaborate with Steve on the songs, and it sounds like it.”

Many of
Tweez
’s most memorable moments and defining characteristics happened spontaneously in the studio, and the only reason they’re on the record is because Albini thought to turn his microphones on. “We didn’t have any lyrics,” Buckler explained to
Alternative Press
, “so Steve recorded Brian jabbering on a scratch track and put it in the mix. He also would secretly record all of us chatting in the snack room. This was our first recording, and Steve Albini was a
superstar. Steve saw us as this goofy math-metal band from Louisville who idolized him. He tried to capture our odd ways and put it on our recording. He was making fun of us, and it worked.”

When Slint showed up to the studio, many of their songs were either unfinished or the band was open to manipulating them. They never rehearsed with vocals, so many of the vocal parts were written on the spot (perhaps explaining the line “I’ve got a Christmas tree inside my head”). Elsewhere Albini added incidental voices (as in “Nan Ding”) or noises (as in “Carol”) to give the songs more density.

The first minute of “Ron,” the opening track, captures the whole aesthetic of
Tweez
. It begins with the band ill prepared — McMahan stammers “Oh, oh, all right,” as if caught off guard before the opening chord strikes. Even as the song gets going, McMahan is still not settled. “Steve, these headphones are fucked up. They’re only coming out of one side, like the . . . Should I just bear with it or what? Shit. They’re fucked.” The music keeps going and McMahan quiets down, as if considering whether or not to deal with his faulty headphones. Then: “Man, no, wait.
Please
give me some new headphones.”

It’s probably the most classic moment on the album. No matter one’s opinion of the record — and there are a lot of Slint fans out there who hate
Tweez
— I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t at least crack a smile at this intro. That very act — smiling or laughing with
Slint — might even be part of the reason why some don’t like
Tweez
. It’s not “Slint,” it’s not
Spiderland
. It’s not the anguish of “Washer” or the creepiness of “Nosferatu Man” or the anxiousness of “Don, Aman.”
Spiderland
, while not completely dark, is not a terribly
funny
album, nor is it boneheaded.
Tweez
is.

All four guys in Slint were just finishing high school when they made
Tweez
. Speaking to
Alternative Press
, McMahan described himself and his bandmates as “very playful, with a boundless sense of optimism.” Albini, in the same article, put it this way: “They were about what you would expect from smart kids in a supportive peer group: prone to ass humor, practical jokes and absurdity on many levels.” “Ass humor” and absurdity are all over the record. Its very title is a reference to Walford’s odd collection of tweezers. A minute and a half into “Warren” the song ends abruptly and the listener is treated to thirty seconds of what sounds like someone jerking off (or, more accurately, indulging their tweezer fetish). The song is followed by “Pat,” which confirms the, uh, fixation of the jerker as an electronic Speak-and-Spell voice intones “canker loaf . . . snatch beast . . . tweezer fetish.” (How did Warren and Pat Buckler — good-hearted Unitarians, mind you — feel about being named for both of the “tweezer fetish” songs?)

“Darlene,” while not absurd or dirty, also points to the band’s level of maturity. Musically the song is one of two on
Tweez
that hints at where Slint were
headed — it’s the quietest song, driven by a slightly eerie guitar line of arpeggios wrapped around a tightly locked rhythm section, as McMahan leads the way (or tags along) with a monologue. Missing here is the literary aspiration found on
Spiderland
in songs like “Nosferatu Man” or “Good Morning, Captain.” Rather, McMahan talks of two platonic friends who become romantically involved. It’s the kind of topic a high school senior might have on his mind, as opposed to the content of
Spiderland
, which seems to come from the head of a college kid immersed in lit studies.

“Darlene” ends with McMahan ominously repeating “We know what happened to them. We know what they did,” hinting at the creepy monotone that would permeate
Spiderland
. “Kent” is the other song on
Tweez
that foreshadows some of the ideas the band would explore in the next few years.
²
At nearly six minutes, it is the longest track on the album. It’s also the only song that really shifts into more than one movement, compared with the other tracks which are mostly built on two riffs each. It begins (after the sound of someone sipping a refreshing beverage) with a cool, almost groovy, clean-tone vamp that Walford quickly cuts off with a snare hit, propelling the band into a jaunty, playful instrumental jam. At one point the band pauses, Walford hits the snare again, and they resume the romp. After a second pause, however, “Kent” moves
into a whole other territory. Buckler hits a stray note on his bass which prompts him and Walford into a tense one-note build. One guitar drops in and out with moody volume swells while the other plays a minimal but discordant lead. Buckler’s voice comes in and cryptically says, “Don’t worry about me / I’ve got a bed / I’ve got a Christmas tree / Inside my head,” sending the song back to that original intro groove, now in full swing as Walford pounds his kick and snare to slowly but forcefully drive the rhythm. McMahan’s guitar enters, doubling the main groove higher up on the neck before moving into a solo that is alternately menacing and disjointed. McMahan’s lead (written by Buckler), all mood and texture, is a contrast to Pajo’s flashier, harmonic-heavy leads on the rest of
Tweez
. In its length, texture, composition, and mood, “Kent” seems to point the way forward for the band.