Slint

Icy architects of one of the most brutal "murders" in rock history, the four members of Slint buried the obvious, fashionable remains and exhumed a landmark act of sonic deconstruction. A swift, blinding, transfiguring plunge into deviance soaked through what was left of punk, of hardcore, of evocative faith, of spectrality, of the love song. A short but productive and truly significant career, a successful launch of new gospels.

At the "beginning" came what was named "Tweez", back in 1989: the raw manifesto of a progressive devastation, the initial, legendary tremor that would lead to the more deliberate genre-dissolving of the later "Slint" (Ep) and "Spiderland". A dissolving that, lightly, lends noble shades to sheer force, sparks endless tension out of scraps of chords and beats, and blurs the line between presence and absence.

"Spiderland", in particular, embodies a becoming that is born, grows and fades away in the warmth of a listening experience both distracted and intense; it is the drafting of an ineffable sense of anticipation and of a cubist approach to interpreting art; it is the flat fall of Golconda's surrealism, an outburst of obsessions, a frenetic provocation. Inert before such a mix of radical gestures, the listener slips into self-satisfaction, almost as if to condemn others' lack of multifaceted richness. The mind empties and fills without rules, disorientation becomes dazzling poetry, and the clamor grows miraculously free of any constraint.

Disarming already from the opening of "Breadcrumb Trail", with a guitar arpeggio also played in plucked harmonics, a spoken voice and an abstract off-beat: the common recording conventions of the era are shredded to pieces, the anarchic frenzy of their putative fathers Squirrel Bait is dematerialized, and later outbursts of noise and tenderness are already foreshadowed. The same noise runs through "Nosferatu Man", an apparently disjointed composition, with a nagging riff pushing forward, interrupted by dazed, deranged sounds: all of it a preamble to the syncopated, distorted cadences of what follows. The same tenderness turns now dark and noir in "Don Aman", now epic and rolling like hills in "Washer". The former seen as an eternal litany, a sketch that soothes its oppressive accompaniments, or an unsolved mystery hidden within the corrosion of three nauseating, esoteric chords. The latter, calmly incendiary like a gem of black romanticism. "Washer", in fact, is a bold outpouring that paints a cathartic love, or is water flowing, suspended between silence and song. It is even Britt Walford's masterpiece, a colossal drummer with an extraordinary gift for weaving rhythm. The residual fabric holds a frightening tenderness, incredible and unexpected, elevating wonder to psychodrama. It always leaves a sense of the unfinished after any instrumental phrase, magnifying curiosity about what will presumably happen next. "Washer" knows how to wrap up the vague exhalations of thought, knows how to soothe the burn of hedonism, and knows how to overturn any ordinary moment. Like an ultra-modern Canticle of the Creatures, it sketches a moving backdrop for a hypothetical resurrection and offers a memorable breath amid emotional pollution.

With "For Dinner" and "Good Morning Captain", the record keeps bleeding, riding decades of lessons that are there but unseen, and saturating its guiding thread with a fascinating sense of impermanence.

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09/11/2006