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Rating: "Tweez": that is, almost half an hour of revolution.
It all started in Louisville, where, from the ashes of Squirrel Bait, singer and guitarist Brian McMahan and drummer Britt Walford met David Pajo and Ethan Buckler, two other guys with several common interests. Thanks to the encounter with the "deus ex machina" Steve Albini, in 1987 they began recording their debut work, released two years later. This is "Tweez".
But it wasn't a game. Or perhaps it was, but not in their intentions. The fact is that the nine songs contained are full of their own life, enough to once again disrupt the history of rock.
Pure madness, a desire to break the sound barrier, with the help of scratchy guitars (a Pajo doing a job like few others) and McMahan's speech that borders on narration. Each song is dedicated to a very dear relative of the four musicians (except "Rhoda", dedicated to Britt Walford's dog), but they seem almost like tracks capable of expressing the inner feelings of each of us. If we are pensive, if we are reflective. Or if we feel, as Clementi would have stated six years later, "like the ceiling of a bombed church".
The recipe for "Tweez" consists of initially completely raw and hard riffs, interspersed with metallic and distorted sounds ("Ron", "Carol"), then a bit calmer, at least for a moment, before exploding once more in our ears ("Kent", "Charlotte"), or even capable of reaching more complex digressions than usual ("Rhoda", "Nan Ding", "Pat"), or in arpeggios like few in the world ("Darlene").
McMahan's anger is not just any anger; it's something destructive, an inability to hold back from certain things in front of him, his voice is almost strangled ("Warren"), or even distorted ("Pat"), a vortex from which it's impossible to escape. You cannot resist.
Everything is destroyed, in pieces, shattered, but there remains a place to take refuge. Yes, a car, that car present even on the cover, where Slint can mount and flee (excluding Buckler, who will make way for the equally skilled Todd Brashear) to then arrive, three years later, in the "Land of the Spiders", creating the album that definitively consecrated their music (namely "Spiderland").
Soon after, a mini EP, the disbandment, up to the present day with the much-desired reunion.
Waiting anxiously for a new studio CD, praise and glory to Mr. Albini, the one who ensured that a band like Slint could express itself in all its facets.
Because the rock world was not only revolutionized by Slint at the time but also by Him. And we cannot help but be grateful.
"Now his bridges sigh eternally
we're dead - it was found - at least
now comes to find a book to read
it turns the pages..."
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