The following is a Designated Cheerleader piece by @Pun_Trash for the Best Album of 1991 tournament. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you follow the link to vote in the tournament. Thanks!
I remember the first time listening to Slint’s album Spiderland in full. I was aware of it from seeing people I followed on Twitter talk about it, calling it one of the great rock albums of the 1990s, but what mainly pulled me in was the cover art. I was intrigued by the photograph of four boys swimming in a quarry. It looked like the photograph taken before a crime scene, the white teeth in their smiles having an eerie glow to them.
It was midnight, a dark, cold Upstate New York January. I turned off all the lights, and sat there in the darkness, as I listened to the album. Multiple emotions began to course through me. At first I was puzzled by the jagged guitars and grooves, by the odd time signatures, by the spoken-word delivery, by lead singer Brian McMahan’s boyish vocals as he sang the chorus of lead track “Breadcrumb Trail”. But the more the album continued, the more I realized that I loved it. Its atmosphere is like the titular spider, it creeps and crawls. Britt Walford’s drums on the track “Nosferatu Man” are haunting, creating an echo that matches the song’s vampiric imagery and the themes of a past relationship that haunts the narrator. “Don, Aman” is where I fully realized the album’s brilliance. A song led by the bass and rhythm guitar, it details a man trying to talk to people at a party, but feels overwhelmed by the mere thought of doing exactly that. Brian McMahan whispers each line, making Don’s struggle to speak and anxiety of being in this place where he feels he doesn’t belong even sadder and more isolating, like the listener is Don himself. “Washer” is a song I’m obsessed with, though it didn’t fully click for me in its first few minutes. McMahan sings the track, but his singing is again, very boyish. But the more I listened to it, I likened it to a teenager confessing these feelings of suicidal tendencies. to his partner, the first person he’s in love with, and his voice began to have a more ghostly quality to it, particularly on the line “My head is empty / My toes are warm / I am safe from harm”. The instrumentation on this track is beyond beautiful. The music on that and the subsequent instrumental track, particularly “For Dinner…” share a feeling of water flowing in the quarry.The images that came to my head were those of a ship, lost at sea, trying to find its way home in the darkness.
And then, the album’s final song, “Good Morning, Captain” was specifically about that. Based on the poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coolidge, this tells the story of a captain lost at sea, being haunted by the waves crashing on his boat, as well as knocking on his door. Britt Walford’s drumming is perfect, his fills between each main rhythm are creative. The notes between David Pajo’s guitar and Todd Brashear’s bass play are creepy and foreboding. The sounds that Pajo makes on his instrument are similar to that of a buoy in the water, a never-ending ringing. McMahan’s vocals are at their creepiest, narrating the tale of this man who is facing death and wants nothing more to be at peace, to be young again. When I listened to this album, in complete darkness, the song’s buildup to its climax was already sending shivers down my spine, but once McMahan broke his spoken word delivery and screamed “I miss you”, I just felt chills all over my body, and once the track was over, I sat there in silence for a minute, taking in those chords, those screams, those drums. One of my favorite songs of all time.
Whenever I listen to this album, I still feel those same chills, I always feel like I’m ready for the moments that will haunt me or get me choked up, but I never am. Each listen, in some respects, feels like the first time. A masterful record, one of my favorites of all time, and deserves every bit of its reputation as one of the greatest albums of the ‘90s.
