Slint Reunited

Unless you devour music magazines, you probably missed the most intense music news of the last couple months. It flew right under the radar, caught only in the underground press and obscure fanzines. Newspapers advertised it, but unless you knew what you were looking at, you may have turned the black inked page without a second glance. Slint reunited to play a small tour. To intellectually understand the impact of Slint on the music world would require intimate knowledge of a number of obscure artifices of modern punk. Some knowledge of the influence of Slint upon emocore and hardcore would be in order. Familiarity with the incestuous music scenes promulgated in communities like Washington D.C. and Louisville wouldn't hurt. The musical talent requires deconstruction, and an evaluation of the impact that the guitar contributes to the album would be on the table for discussion. If what you're looking for, though, is to emotionally and viscerally understand Slint, all you need is a little under 40 minutes; the length of Spiderland.

Slint's second LP is still shockingly original and breathtaking more than a decade after recording. The songs can be evaluated with as rigorous as methodology as personification, trying to decode whom is the personality singing the songs. Will Oldham's voice on the record is haunting, but the stories he tells are sophisticated enough to be read as something separate from himself. He isn't just writing about his own tales of misery and woe, but something subtler.

"I know it's dark outside/ don't be afraid/ everytime I ever cried from fear/ was just a mistake that I made/ Wash yourself in your tears/ and build your church/ on the strength of your faith."

If your exposure to misery in music is limited to Dashboard Confessional's The Places You Have Come to Fear, then you haven't been washed over by the harsh beauty of Spiderland. I've heard it described as music to accompany the day after the apocalypse, when you've discovered that you're the only person alive. Where doom and Black Sabbath play to the moment of destruction, Slint play to the headache and heartache when you realize that everyone you've ever loved is gone. They personify the insane capacity to feel pain in loneliness. Carrabba has never reached this level of emotional depths. The purpose of the comparison isn't to insult neo-emo music, but merely to illustrate that the word visceral isn't hyperbole when discussing Slint. The music lodges into your gut and messes with your perceptions of reality.

Then there is the fact that nothing else sounds like it. Alternative Press mentions it, Filter mentions it, Punk Planet mentions it. In fact, every major music critic who writes about Slint will make note of the band's originality. This isn't just because of laziness (though partially it is. It's easier to write how original a band is than to explain what gives them this attribute), but rather because there is an actual element of something completely new in Slint that isn't found anywhere else. The slow beauty and piercing lyrics conjure up an experience beyond the sum of its parts. When you listen to this music, you know that you are listening to something new.

The most frequent criticism of music is its derivative nature. It is almost unavoidable due to the consequences of economic pressure and the more excusable one of influence. Whenever one band makes it big, you'll have copycats. A recent post on Alternative Press Message Boards was titled: "A plea for originality." Though we would like to believe that we are waiting for something original and new, human nature gravitates us towards music that we're used to. When we hear something like Slint, we don't know what to do. How do we mentally file it away? How does our subconscious mind make the metaconnections necessary for us to find a way to relate to it? Slint makes it virtually impossible to construct a "If you like this: You'll like this" list. The best you can do is give physical description to musical content. Susan Sontag explained that music was the only art that was completely self-referential. The words of a book relate to language, and a piece of artwork relates to physical images. But music has no physical comparison. Slint takes it a step beyond, refusing to even entertain a musical comparison. I can't compare Slint to any other band, because Slint is unlike every other band.

The real story behind the Slint reunion lies in the fact that every Oral History and Interview with the band will go around in meaningless circles, unable to articulate the meaning of the band. They can explain the influences, reassure us of its originality, and praise the technical skill, but due to the inherent inability of something like Slint's Spiderland to be explained, they will ultimately fail to convey the music. The only thing left to do is return to the first paragraph and put the album on for yourself. That's the only way to find a common language to attempt to explain it.