Slint
Spiderland

Breadcrumb Trail, Nosferatu Man, Don Aman, Washer, For Dinner, Good Morning Captain. Six tracks halfway between a clumsy, ramshackle, biting ultra-amplified blues-folk and instrumental music of noise-rock extraction, played both with the fervor of experienced musicians and with the solemn mastery of an avant-garde ensemble. All six tracks involve complex and daring harmonic, timbral, rhythmic, and (anti)melodic reworkings. There are dissonances, beats, off-key consonances, even distorted variations of the timbral and chord sequence (as in Don Aman, one of the most underrated tracks on the album). The singing is as poetically malleable as ever: scream, whisper, jolt (of the soul and its dark folds), uneasy speech, environmental declamation, catatonic delirium.

In the guise of a teenage album, it is, at the same time, cataloging and dissecting, starting point and no-return, a constructive indictment of a universe, an expressionist altar of monstrous deformation and hybridization. It starts from the suburban night, those neon-lit corners, of murky, blurred roads and memories, made of decadent audiovisual flashes, and reaches cosmic mourning, in a pinnacle of dramatic crescendos that goes from the initial harmonic muting to Mcmahan’s outbursts at the close.
The most advanced stage of post-hardcore. A very complex mosaic of subliminal shards. The perfect account of an inner death. The black box of the cosmos. The ultimate disintegration of rock and its icons. A symphonic poem of majestic silent acoustic terrorism. The irrevocable seal to mourning in music. The high song of a troubled and devastated generation.

Under Albini's guidance, it is also a showcase of the instrumental masterpieces of the band's members: first and foremost the moving drum part by Walford (later with the Breeders) and Pajo's sick and oblique guitar. From a low-key release of American underground to an epochal work: numerous offspring and more or less transversal kinships that the creative shockwave of the work in question will help to birth. The second and last album of the Louisville band, which will dissolve and disperse its members somewhat everywhere, recorded in a session lasting from August to October '90. In that distant 1991 it went unnoticed, as is rightly the case for all true breakthrough works, so great was the innovative scope of the record.