Pretty Goes with Pretty

Talking Talk Talk

There are many remarkable aspects to the story of Talk Talk’s fifth and final album, Laughing Stock. It took a year to make, and most of what was put to tape ended up on the scrapheap. In London’s Wessex Studios, where it was recorded, windows were blacked out, clocks removed, and light sources limited to oil projectors and strobe lights. Around fifty musicians contributed to its making, but only eighteen ended up on the finished album. It was a commercial failure, critically reviled as much as it was praised, and was impossible to perform live. Then the band broke up, forcing fans to wait seven years before its central protagonist released any new music, something followed by almost complete silence. Laughing Stock is also shrouded in mystery: apart from limited comments made during brief bursts of promotional activity to promote their own even more limited work since, the three authors of the record – Mark Hollis (songwriter and founder), Tim Friese-Greene (producer and co-songwriter since their third album, The Colour Of Spring) and Lee Harris (drums, and the only other remaining member of the band’s original line up by the time of Laughing Stock) – have refused to discuss it for years. But the music remains, its reputation growing with each passing year since its release two decades ago: stark, bold, indefinable and the greatest testament to the band.

Wyndham Wallace's article on Laughing Stock for the Quietus is a terrific overview of Talk Talk's progression from synthpop hitmakers to unparalleled aesthetes. I only vaguely know the story of Talk Talk and the difficulties in making their last two albums, owing to the fact that I'm a fairly new fan of the albums. After putting off hearing Spirit of Eden for years and years and years (for no real reason), I finally made a point to hear it while I was doing research for my book on Slint's Spiderland, since Spirit gets namechecked along with Spiderland (and Bark Psychosis' Hex) as being a progenitor of post-rock. Though I have a lot of misgivings with that genre tag, and with these albums as being the best appropriate reference points, I still couldn't rightly write about Slint's legacy without hearing these other oft-referenced albums too. Thank god I did! Both Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock are brilliant, brilliant works of art.

As Wallace describes it, I see some parallels between Slint and Talk Talk's crippling level of perfectionism. Slint was only in the studio for Spiderland for four days, but they spent two years laboring over their songs. The songwriting processes between the two bands was worlds apart, but the effect of focusing intensely on a small number of songs seems to have had the same result: the end of the band, and ostensibly the end of some members' music careers entirely.

Anyway, it's a great article and a good introduction to Talk Talk's story if you're not familiar. Both Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock are begging for the reissue treatment, given so many bands referencing their sound of late. Tthe Antlers and Wild Beasts spring to mind first, though Radiohead would be nowhere without Laughing Stock. Listen to "After the Flood": you think Jonny Greenwood's guitar would sound the way it does if he hadn't heard Laughing Stock?

 

Good Morning, Zelda

 

I can't not share this, via the Decibel Tolls.

Maurice (Pre-Slint) Demos Now Available

If you've read my book on Spiderland, you know that one of my main arguments in the opening chapter is that the significance of Squirrel Bait in the pre-Slint soup is somewhat overstated, considering David Grubbs wrote the majority of that band's music and lyrics and that Brian McMahan and Britt Walford were not really in the band at the same time. But there's a recorded documentation of Squirrel Bait and all those names are in the liner notes, so there you go. Rather, in my interviews for the book, it was made pretty clear to me that another band had a much more direct tie to Slint: Maurice.

Maurice was a heavy, aggressive metal band originally started by Britt Walford, Brian McMahan, and Ned Oldham and featuring Sean "Rat" Garrison on lead vocals. That early incarnation lasted not very long—Oldham was replaced by a guy named Mike Bucayu (who along with Rat would later form Kinghorse), and McMahan was replaced by David Pajo. I've written a little about this on the blog before, and you can still read an excerpt from the book detailing the earliest period in Slint's history at the 33 1/3 blog.

The thing about Maurice, though, is that they never did any proper recordings, so their place in Slint's history is easy to overlook. That's why I'm happy to report that David Pajo has recently made their one and only demo—recorded on a boombox at the specific request of one Glenn Danzig—available  to all.

As with most things Slint-related, you should prepare yourself for something that sounds nothing like Slint whatsoever. Maurice was a metal band. The songs on the demo hardly hint at the Slint you most wish you could have more of (ie, Spiderland). Here and there, like toward the end of "The Struggle," you can hear small hints of things to come on Tweez—Walford's insane drumming and Pajo's compulsive need to play as many artificial harmonics as possible—but even so it's not made transparant that this band might turn into Slint. (It is a fact, however, that the final song Maurice wrote became the first Slint song, "Pat," but this demo predates that song. To my knowledge, the Maurice version of that song was never recorded.) It is worth keeping in mind, though, that everyone playing on this demo was about fifteen years old at the time.

Not to be a shill (okay, a little bit to be a shill), but there are a lot of great stories about Maurice in the book, if you haven't read it, including their brief tour with Samhain, with Will Oldham in tow. (Oldham came close to joining Slint right after the group splintered off from Maurice—can you imagine?) So, you know, go buy the book. And buy the Maurice demo here.

Happy 20th Anniversary, Spiderland

Twenty years ago this week, Spiderland hit stores like a drop of water in a vast ocean. How we all still know about it (and, for many, revere it) all these years later is a miracle of word of mouth.

On the occasion of the anniversary I did an interview with Adam Trainer of the excellent post-rock radio show out of Australia, Posted, who dedicated a whole two-hour show to the album's anniversary (click on the March 23 episode). The show includes tracks by Slint as well as bands from Slint members both before and after, as well as lots of other groups from the same general universe, interspersed with clips of me in conversation with Trainer about the album and its legacy. You can also hear my interview in full, sans music.

 Oh, and if you havn't already, buy the freakin' book!

• Slint: Nosferatu Man

Spiderland Book Party This Thursday in LA

 
Avert your eyes from the many end-of-year lists and join me this Thursday at the Mandrake Bar in Culver City to celebrate the release of Spiderland, even though technically it's been out for about a month. I don't get out much, so indulge me. Friends, "friends," strangers, and fellow Slint fans are all invited. My friends from the Cargo Culte will be spinning 90s indie/post-rock for the night. Beer, books, and 90s nostalgia! It's hard to do better. The best part is there will be a bunch of bloggers there so even if you're not online, you can still argue about whether the mediocre Arcade Fire album or the hit-and-miss Deerhunter album or the consistently good but rarely awesome LCD Soundsystem album are the best of the year. You don't have to live in two worlds!

The Pre-Slint Era: Languid & Flaccid, Maurice, Solution Unknown, Squirrel Bait

The first chapter of my book on Spiderland deals with the primordial period in Slint's history, discussing the obvious touchstone of Squirrel Bait (who Dave Grohl just singled out in a list of great 80s hardcore songs for Rolling Stone), but also the less renowned pre-Slint bands the Languid and Flaccid, Solution Unknown, and Maurice. Since the book doesn't contain any images or (duh) audio, consider this a supplement to that first chapter.

The original pre-Slint band was the Languid and Flaccid, formed by classmates Britt Walford and Brian McMahan when they were in 6th grade. Also in the band was Will Oldham's older brother, Ned, and two other friends, Stephanie Karta and Paul Catlett. You can read an excerpt from the book at the 33 1/3 blog which goes into some detail on this band. I'm not aware of any recordings existing for this band, but here's an amazing picture of the group hanging out outside the Beat Club before an all-ages matinee (via Louisville Punk).

L-R: Britt Walford, Stephanie Karta, Ned Oldham, Brian McMahan, Paul Catlett

By the time the band reached junior high, the Languid and Flaccid splintered into two projects, with Walford, McMahan, and Oldham forming a second group, Maurice. This was a much more aggressive and heavy band, and eventually the Languid and Flaccid evaporated.

Maurice was fronted by Sean "Rat" Garrison, who I interviewed in depth for the book. He is such a strong personality, and eminently quotable (I think my favorite was "Music is like being on a viking ship; I have come to humiliate you with my band!"); his presence in the book definitely makes this early chapter much more vivid, especially since awareness of Maurice doesn't really extend beyond Louisville.

Maurice quickly turned into a kind of incubator for ideas that would later wind up in Slint. Both Oldham and McMahan left the band early on, replaced by Mike Bucayu and David Pajo. It was the collaboration between Walford and Pajo in this band that eventually led to the creation of Slint.

I've done my best to describe Maurice's music in the book. They began as a straightforward hardcore band, then morphed into a metal band with lots of flashy guitar solos, before ultimately evolving into something more odd and obtuse—essentially Tweez-era Slint but with a screaming rage-aholic on the mic. This description is based partly on a few demos and live songs I've heard and partly on descriptions of the band given to me by Garrison, Pajo, and Todd Brashear, who was a fan of the band before he knew any of them personally.

Unfortunately I don't have any Maurice audio which I'm at liberty to upload, but given Garrison's strong presence in the book I wanted to at least give a sample of what he sounded like, so you could imagine this voice over a song like, say, "Charlotte" or "Warren." So, in lieu of Maurice, here are a couple of samples from Kinghorse, the band Garrison and Bucayu formed after Maurice broke up. Kinghorse was positively huge in the Louisville scene, pulling in hundreds and hundreds of kids to their shows and eventually landing a record deal with Caroline Records. Their debut album was produced by Glenn Danzig, who Garrison was chummy with (as readers of the book will learn, Maurice did a short string of dates around the Midwest opening for Samhain). "Caged" is a track from that debut. The video below is an early version of a song called "Freeze," performed at the legendary Louisville club Tewligan's Tavern (now known as "Cahoots" and quite a bit less legendary) back in Kinghorse's formative days.

• Kinghorse: Caged

 

Toward the end of Maurice's run, the bassist Mike Bucayu decided to start a second band in which he could put forth more of his own songwriting ideas (Maurice's songs were totally controlled by Walford and Pajo). The band was Solution Unknown, and David Pajo joined up as well—as the drummer. Midway into this band's brief run, Todd Brashear joined up as second guitarist. This band was in many ways formed as a reaction to Maurice, who were venturing into weirder and weirder musical territory. Innovation was absolutely not the name of the game in Solution Unknown. They really just wanted to be a hardcore band that whipped large crowds of kids into a frenzy. They recorded one album, Karen, with Don Zientarra.

• Solution Unknown: Used To Be

Concurrent with Maurice, Squirrel Bait was making its name in the Louisville and national scene. The band, I feel, is given too much credit for leading to Slint. The majority of the songs, both music and lyrics, were written by David Grubbs. People see the liner notes to their self-titled debut and see both Britt Walford and Brian McMahan's names and thus jump to the conclusion that that if half of Slint was in the band, it follows that Slint evolved from here. It's really not true. In fact Walford and McMahan were never in the band at the same time. Walford was in the group only briefly—long enough to record a demo which was never released. A year later, well after Walford was gone, the band pulled two tracks from this demo to add to their debut because they couldn't afford to re-record them. Here's another track from that same demo, which didn't end up on any official Squirrel Bait albums. You can clearly hear how the band was much more influenced by hardcore in these early recordings.

• Squirrel Bait: Insult to Injury

McMahan joined the group after that demo was recorded and Ben Daughtery was brought in as the group's permanent drummer. Still, he wasn't the primary songwriter. His only songwriting credit on the debut, to my knowledge, was the opening track, "Hammering So Hard." The rest came from David Grubbs—about which I'll say more in a future post.

• Squirrel Bait: Hammering So Hard

Utica Quarry

Last year I had the chance to actually go to Louisville to do a little research for my book, so of course I had to seek out the infamous quarry in which the cover for Spiderland was shot. As I drove there I found myself literally pulling over every few minutes to record the details of my journey there. Getting to the quarry was an oddly surreal experience, not least because everything was in color!

  

Like what you see? For the ultimate fanboy experience, this can be your back yard!

Spiderland is Here!

I've now heard a number of people say that they've seen or picked up the Spiderland book in stores, and Amazon pre-orders have hit homes. It's really here! Now that it's officially available, I plan to do a handful of Slint-related posts here in the coming weeks, as a kind of supplement to some of the passages in the book. Meanwhile, Louisville-based blog The Decibel Tolls just published an interview with me, if you're so inclined.

I also thought I'd try a little experiment: As you may notice in the sidebar, I've added a link you can follow to ask me questions about Slint, Spiderland, or anything else tangentially related or otherwise—whether you've had the chance to read the book or not. I'll answer the questions as they come via my tumblr, so follow me there if you don't already. I'll also post occasional roundups of any questions/answers here.

Spiderland Approaches...

 
The countdown has begun! My book on Slint's Spiderland will be in stores in about a month. As in, mere weeks from now. The 33 1/3 blog has posted an excerpt from the first chapter today. You can pre-order it from Amazon now. I'll have some more Spiderland-related announcements as the release date gets a little closer.

•  Slint: Nosferatu Man

Missed Disconnections

Today I gave my brilliant wife a ride to work. She works on the west side and has to be in early in the morning—by 6 am. Once I dropped her off I couldn't resist stopping by the beach since I was so close and had plenty of time to kill.

The beach in the early morning is probably my favorite thing about Los Angeles (rivaled only by the beach in winter, at any time of day). The air is cool, barely anyone is around, and the light is perfect—the sky almost blends right into the sea. You're subsumed by these three expanses—the sky, the ocean, the vast beach, smoothed out by the now-receded tide and unsullied by people or their tracks. There's nowhere better to just sit and be silent. It was good for me.

• Hearts & Flowers: Try for the Sun

*

On the way home I listened to Grizzly Bear's Vekatimest in the car. It was the closest I've ever come to connecting with this band. I don't know why I haven't, and honestly it flummoxes me that I can't. They've got all the ingredients that should go into my ideal band—beautiful harmonies, great atmospherics, an equal appreciation of 50s–60s pop and rock and contemporary art-rock, riding the fence between easy earworms and dramatic walls of sound. If I were to start a band today, it would probably sound a lot like Grizzly Bear. Yet I just cannot settle up to what they're serving. Too pretentious? Too self-conscious? Too quote-unquote arty? Maybe.

Sometimes you just need the right environment, mixed with the right mood, for a record to click. I came close this morning. I was feeling disconnected—from myself, from the world in front of my face. So maybe hearing a band who also strike me as disconnected—from me, perhaps from their own ability to hit on any kind of nuanced emotion amidst all their dramatic compositions—was the right thing. I floated on their harmonies, rode the waves of their ups and downs,  felt oddly unsettled yet comforted by their borg-like lack of humanity. I was feeling just slightly alien, was just barely outside of my own body. I was feeling about myself the way I feel about Grizzly Bear. Disconnected.

• Grizzly Bear: Cheerleader

*

On Saturday I was home alone, working on a freelance project, when I suddenly became distracted and started sifting through my iTunes to make a new playlist. I'm not sure what triggered it—maybe it was a Galaxie 500 song, or a Deerhunter track. I don't know. But I started scrolling through my library, pulling every song that "fit," though I wasn't really working with a theme. When I was done I had about forty tracks and the whole thing, I realized, resembled the first portion of this playlist, which I made last year. Here's how I described what I was drawn to at the time:

I'd find myself gravitating to a certain kind of music. It was hazy, hypnotic, gauzelike, perhaps with some percussive undercurrent. So, a lot of krautrock. Animal Collective's "For Reverend Green" fit the bill in a big way. Of course I wasn't in the mood for happy music, but I also wasn't in the mood for sad music. I wanted some sort of emotionless music. Something that could envelop me and keep the world on pause or at a distance.

Lately I've been drawn to that sound again. Perhaps not as propulsive, perhaps with less simmering tension. Something a little more numb. I don't know why.

• Galaxie 500: Temperature's Rising
• The Eloise Trio: Island Woman
• Deerhunter: Little Kids

*

I know why. It's not anything special—it's work stress. It's a feeling of not being productive enough outside of work. It's the feeling of hurtling through a busy year full of personal and professional hurdles. You know, the same shit everyone else goes through.

• The For Carnation: Tales (Live from the Crypt)
• The Electric Prunes: General Confessional

*

We watched (500) Days of Summer on Sunday. It was a great movie, recommended. There was a scene, though, where a line out of Zooey Deschanel's mouth had the accidental effect of reminding me of my dad. I went into a funk for the rest of the day and, as of today, haven't really risen out of it. I will, I will. There's enough wonderful things happening in my life right now that I will. But it's a strange feeling to be pulled—forcibly, imperceptibly—into a mood or mindset that you weren't expecting. No external event really triggered this. It's not his birthday, not father's day, not anything. I just felt a memory.

It's not really something to explain. I expect it will happen many times in the future, for the rest of my life. My brilliant wife asked me about it last night, asked if I wanted to talk about it. Well, no. There's not really anything to say—"I miss my dad." Okay. That's it and that's also hardly it. There are no words to articulate how I feel—there's only the search for the right song to connect to.

• Seam: Autopilot

 

Pretty Goes with Pretty Goes to Spiderland

So, yes, it's official now: I'm at work on writing a book about Slint's Spiderland as part of Continuum's 33 1/3 series. I started working on this back in October, turned in my proposal in December, and have since anxiously watched my inbox and the 33 1/3 blog as the contenders went from a longlist of 597, then to 170, then to 25, and finally to the 11 final selections. I'm really thrilled and honored to be a part of a series that has put out so many great books by artists and writers I really admire. And you can't believe how excited I am to tackle, of all albums, Spiderland. This is the album that, fifteen or sixteen years ago, completely impacted the way I listen to music. I've gone through my share of musical phases in my life, but Spiderland is one that has remained with me throughout.

I'm still so early in the process that I don't want to go too much into detail about how I'll approach the record, but suffice to say I think Spiderland is one of the most mysterious albums of the last twenty years, and Slint one of the most mysterious bands. I plan to get as deep into that mystery as I can. I'll be spending the rest of this year, and maybe a little of next, researching and writing. The book should come out some time next year.

I want to give a shout out to Sam Yurick for helping me with an early draft of the proposal, and an even bigger shout out to my brilliant wife, who has been so encouraging over the last few months and who indulges me daily as I blabber on about any and all Slint-related ideas passing through my head.

Now to the writing part. Wish me luck!

This Week's Soundtrack

Monks, Black Monk Time
Tied & Tickled Trio, Observing Systems
Kronos Quartet, Kronos Quartet Performs Philip Glass
John Coltrane, A Love Supreme
Of Montreal, Skeletal Lamping
Icebreaker International, Trein Maersk: A Report to the NATOarts Board of Directors
The Dave Brubeck Quartet, Time Out
Brian Eno, Another Green World
Four Tet, Ringer
Holy Fuck, LP
Okkervil River, The Stand Ins
Slint, Tweez and Spiderland
The Breeders, Pod
Dinosaur Jr., Bug

I haven't listened to Tweez in years. Hearing it this week, I think I listened to it for the first time without trying to process it through the prism of "this is by the band that made Spiderland." On its own terms: it's a good record. Kinda fun! Of all the albums you see listed this week, Tweez is probably the one I've listened to the most—at least once or twice a day since Monday, when I re-bought it.

• Slint: Ron

Life-changing Albums: Drive Like Jehu's Yank Crime

One of my criteria for a “life-changing album,” as I outlined on Monday, was that the album permanently alters the course of everything you seek out going forward. In other words the albums of your life are necessarily shaped by your life-changing albums because the latter influence your overall taste directly. Talk about altering the course of my tastes: Drive Like Jehu destroyed rock music for me.

I heard both Jehu albums around the same time, must have been 1994 or 1995. And to my mind they had perfected rock music. Post-Jehu, whenever I heard a new band that was trying to play fast and/or loud, it felt limp. I just turned it off and put on Jehu. For about a decade—literally!—I never once felt the need to purchase albums by rock bands (particularly new ones). Perhaps it’s not coincidental that the most typical brand of indie rock during those ten years was the nascent genre of emo, which was ridiculously in debt to Jehu, among other bands (too, all those spazzcore bands, largely hailing from San Diego, who also owed much to Jehu). Lots of people credit Rites of Spring as being the original emo band, and I won’t argue against their influence; but Jehu had a significant impact as well, in the form of the octave chord.

Much like Slint inspiring a myriad sub-par post-rock acts to abandon upstrokes, Drive Like Jehu neutered the power chord. The crunch of the power chord felt almost amateur compared to the sharp-edged attack of the octave. The worst (and most prevalent) emo bands took as their template the inward-looking lyrics of Rites of Spring, the song structures of Orange County pop punk, and the octave chord of Drive Like Jehu.* You might see, then, why I felt this music paled in comparison to Yank Crime. These bands missed everything else.

And it’s the everything else that made this album so important to me. Like Spiderland, Yank Crime’s brilliance did not dawn on me immediately. I had a nearly identical experience with “Luau” as I did with “Washer.” I owned the album for more than a year already. I knew that I loved it—its pure adrenaline was undeniable—but one day I was on a long drive, alone, listening to “Luau” for the umpteenth time when I noticed that, hang on a second, this song has a guitar solo! It kicks in at the 7:35 mark and it is 90% feedback. In the 1960s I guess Hendrix was giving people the same epiphany, and in the 80s (and 90s) I’d guess Thurston Moore was doing the same, but it was John Reis’s solo in “Luau” that blew my mind, and I can pinpoint that revelation as the exact moment I figured out what kind of guitar player I wanted to be. The epiphany was two-fold: 1) that noise can be manipulated into melody, and vice versa; and 2) that making music is a lot more primitive than I’d ever truly grasped. Technique, in the traditional sense of the word, doesn't mean much. Scales, speed, dexterity—it's irrelevant. That's not to say that a Ramones-like approach to punk is  some kind of ideal. What Jehu taught me is less naive, more intuitive. The great guitar players in my book concern themselves with the sound that comes from their instrument, and the emotion evoked by that sound. To try and parse that concept any further is to undermine what the instrument is capable of. If you're Drive Like Jehu, you can do a guitar solo that is nearly all feedback and sounds like gamma rays from a 1950s sci-fi flick. If you're U.S. Maple, you can detune your guitar and play whatever fucked chords you want. If you're Mick Turner of the Dirty Three you can leave the flash to your violinist and set the tone of each song through your fragile, muddy chords. (For further proof of Turner's brilliance, listen to Cat Power's Moon Pix and ask yourself why that album is still her best: it's those fragile chords, and it's Turner, not Marshall, playing them.) These are some of my all-time favorite guitarists, and to my ears what they all have in common is an approach to the guitar that respects the sounds it is capable of creating, rather than any kind of presumptions about their technical skills as guitarists.

Slint taught me something sophisticated about songwriting—how to apply sound to song in a meaningful way. Drive Like Jehu taught me something much more primal but no less significant: how to relate to one’s instrument; how to extract sound from an instrument rather than simply “play” it.

Next up: Low.

[*Caveat: I know Jehu didn’t invent the octave chord. In fact the template for the entirety of Jehu’s sound seems to have been set by a 30-second snippet of Television’s “Marquee Moon”—tune into that song at 8:10 through 8:40. But Jehu took that single moment and turned it into their driving aesthetic; and it’s that aesthetic that influenced everyone post-Jehu.]

Life-changing Albums: Slint's Spiderland

Belatedly picking up where last Monday’s post left off, my list dwindles significantly when trying to think of albums that changed my life, as opposed to those that were the soundtrack to my life. First of all, what does it even mean to have an album “change your life”? It's not like a person, who can encourage or influence you. It's not a change of location, which can present you with new opportunities. It's not even like a book, which can articulate ideas or philosophies in profound ways. The more I think about it, “life-changing” might be a phrase too hyperbolic for music.

But an album can profoundly change your relation to music, and in effect set a new course for all those “albums of your life” that are so much easier to rattle off. That’s no small thing, and in some sense that could be considered life-changing if your world (like mine) revolves so heavily around music. It’s the albums that taught you to hear music in new ways, and shaped your overall taste.

No surprise, then, that the biggest life-changing albums for me came during high school. Probably the same can be said for you. For me, the holy trinity of life-changing albums, all bought within a year of each other, were Slint’s Spiderland, Drive Like Jehu’s Yank Crime, and Low’s I Could Live in Hope (actually, I often think of both of Jehu’s albums and everything by Low through Secret Name as of a piece, but for this post’s purposes I’ll stick to the first albums I heard by each.)

I heard all of these albums at a time when I was actively looking for a new musical trajectory, as I mentioned in last week’s post. I had no real guidance, no roadmap to indie rock. I was hungry for something new but really had no idea what that meant. Each of these albums were unique epiphanies. Not just in the way that I said “yes, this!” to something vaguely called “indie rock”—though that did happen; not just in the way that I said no to “heavy” and said yes to “quiet” or “dramatic” or “dirty” or however you want to describe these bands. I wasn’t merely trading adjectives: I was discovering nouns: tension, nuance, adrenaline. Each album showed me how to articulate feelings, ideas, and emotions through sound—and in turn how to hear all other music at this level, and determine whether a band (to my ears) was successful at what they were attempting. This week I’m going to try to dig into each of these albums and try to explore this in more depth. We’ll begin with Slint.

None of these albums were lightning bolts to my brain. I owned Spiderland for months, simply liking the album, before one night in my bedroom when “Washer” came on and I quietly stopped what I was doing and listened, from the first note to the last. Though I’d heard the song numerous times already, this was the first time it had become exhilarating. Never had a song’s dynamic shifts seemed to resonate so perfectly with its emotional content. The genius of “Washer” is that it attempts, three times, to reach some sort of sonic release. But it doesn’t hit: just as it feels that it’s about to climax, it gets quieter instead. The lyric “I’m too tired now” seems to apply directly to the song’s ability to reach its payoff. Finally at the end it blows its lid, huge chords and squealing guitars—but it only lasts a few seconds. It was all the energy the song could muster after building for six or seven minutes.

So many of Slint’s imitators got it wrong, and listening to “Washer” you can see where they erred. It’s not about the juxtaposition of loud/quiet. Mogwai’s Young Team, for example, is a good album but not nearly so great as Slint’s modest effort. Young Team takes the polarity of loud/quiet to a dramatic but elementary extreme: things get really, really, really quiet, to the point that you need to turn your stereo up just to hear it, and at the drop of a hat the band becomes ear-splittingly loud. Dramatic, sure, but it doesn’t earn its drama the way “Washer” does.

And don’t even get me started on downstrokes. Spiderland nearly ruined indie rock by encouraging people to abandon upstrokes altogether. “Don, a Man” is the only song on Spiderland that employs this guitar style, yet for most of the late 90s it seemed to become the template for hundreds of forgettable bands trying to get more facile ideas across. But again, the bands that applied this technique to their guitar playing missed the point of a song like “Don”: tension. “Don” had a palpable sense of foreboding and anxiety, both lyrically and musically. It’s the subtle difference between a tense song and a song concerned with tension.

Slint weren’t the first or last band to understand the kind of thought that must go into the details of songwriting, but they were the band that opened my eyes to nuance in song craft. Hence Spiderland may well be the most life-changing of any album I’ve ever owned. This goes back to what I was saying the other day about the song vs. the sound. Spiderland taught me that more needs to go into one’s music beyond “that sounds cool,” and that, beyond lyrics or vocal delivery, a song can explore feelings more subtle than love or anger purely through how the instruments are played.

This only scratches the surface of my feelings for this record—I could post all week about it, at least. Nevertheless, next up: Drive Like Jehu.

Albums of My Life

Last week I referred to Paul Simon’s Graceland as an “album of my life.” Coincidentally, this thread at Last Plane to Jakarta took a brief tangent into what constitutes a “life-changing album.” Two different concepts, and I’ve had both on my mind in the last few days. The first is a lot easier to find examples of: albums that I played intensely during some period of my life, to the point of becoming something other than good or great albums; rather, they're the soundtrack to memories. The second category, life-changing albums, is harder to figure out. Before I try to sort that one out, I want to think about the other.

Albums of my life. Going back as far as I can, my childhood was filled with Simon & Garfunkel, Cat Stevens, Jim Croce, Ry Cooder. I have strong mental associations with all those artists, and in retrospect they all must have set some kind of foundation for what I’ve come to like today.

George Michael’s Faith might have been the very first album I ever viewed as wholly mine: an cassette I kept in my own room, played on my own walkman. INXS’s Kick and Run-DMC’s Raising Hell, too. In elementary school I would walk laps around the track during recess with Danny Casares as we tried to piece together the lyrics to “You Be Illin’ from memory. By sixth grade I was transfixed by Appetite for Destruction—probably the first album I’d ever associated with danger. This led to junior high and high school, where Master of Puppets, Rust in Peace, and Persistence of Time set the template for my taste in metal. By my junior or senior year I was transitioning out of metal and into something else: Rollins Band (particularly the early stuff), Tool, and a band I’d discovered through a blind purchase at Tower Records, Craw, all made music that was heavy but was more dynamic musically and more sophisticated lyrically and emotionally.

Somehow from there I stumbled into indie rock without any real guidance (which I’ve written about before). By then I’d lost interest in heaviness but was actively looking for music that shifted dynamically. Slint, Fugazi, Rodan, Codeine. I vividly recall moving to college and trying to describe the kind of music I liked to a kid I’d met in the dorms. “It can be really loud and really screamy, but it can also get really quiet, and it’s not heavy like metal.” He just looked at me and said “what, you mean emo?”

Another dormmate gave me a dubbed cassette full of songs by what I thought was some friend of hers; the recording quality was exceptionally poor and all the label said was “Elliott Smith.” I played the hell out of the tape but was embarrassed to tell the girl I dug it so much because it seemed a little weird to be really into her random friend’s music. Six months later I was in a record store and saw the album in the bin—a real record by a real guy on a real label, and best of all that was another album (Roman Candle) in the bins as well!

The rest of college was Tortoise, June of 44, Blonde Redhead, Unwound, Superchunk, the Pernice Brothers. After college, when I met my wife: My Morning Jacket’s The Tennessee Fire, Cat Power’s Moon Pix, Rufus Wainwright’s first album, Ryan Adams’s Heartbreaker.

We got married in September 2001: she walked down the aisle to Sigur Ros’ “Sven-g-Englar” and we danced to Low’s “Two Step.” We moved to New York not long after. If you asked me to soundtrack the winter of 2002, when we lived in a spacious but empty loft above a functioning sweatshop in a shitty part of Williamsburg, I’d have to hand you Pete Yorn’s Music for the Morning After. When we moved to Boerum Hill it was Chutes too Narrow, Michigan, and Radio Dept.’s Lesser Matters. We bought Feist’s Let it Die in Paris in 2004. We moved to L.A. in 2005 and in the last two or three years it’s been Funeral, Antonio Carlos Jobim & Elis Regina, Midlake, and most recently Andrew Bird.

These are albums of my life. And really I’m just scratching the surface—this is what I can come up with just thinking about it in the time it takes to write these words. Were I to focus on one period of my life, other albums would come into view, sort of like staring at the night sky and seeing the stars reveal themselves the longer you look.

But not all of these albums are my all-time favorites, necessarily. Some I haven’t listened to in years, either because my tastes have changed drastically (everything pre-Spiderland), because I associate them too strongly with my memories (Moon Pix), because they’ve just not aged well (sadly, Spiderland), or because they’re frankly not that good (Music for the Morning After).

Thus we come to the difference between an album of my life and an album that changed my life. More on that later this week.