REVIEW: Slint – Spiderland Deluxe Box Set

A long time ago, a bunch of nerds sat in a basement in Louisville, Kentucky and made some music. It was a strange brew of different tastes and influences, delivered via a unique creative chemistry, which sounded like nothing else that had come before it; dark, sexy and scary.

Born from lengthy jam sessions, the music eventually materialised into six tracks which would make up a record called Spiderland. The band responsible was named Slint. It was their second and final album.

Spiderland was released in March 1991, the band having broken up only a few months beforehand. With no tour and little else in the way of promotion, the album made its way quietly into record stores and sold in miniscule quantities. The Slint alumni busied themselves with other projects. Life went on.

But the record had a bigger destiny ahead of it. Very slowly, and very surely, it became a word-of-mouth phenomenon, passing over the years from one listener to another like the audio equivalent of a secret handshake. The first time I heard Spiderland was in a car on a night time drive from London to Kettering in the summer of 2001. I had never heard anything like it. Not long after, a friend passed on a copy of the album on a D90 cassette. I have been in love with it ever since.

Thirteen years later, Slint have reformed and played live to captivated, reverential audiences around the world. Spiderland now regularly makes best-of lists among musicians and the music press. The record is a cult classic, its ahead-of-its-time genius now abundantly clear for all to see. To celebrate, the band have re-released it as a deluxe box set limited to 3,188 copies. This author is lucky enough to have number 1,175.

There’s a lot to take in. Alongside a remastered version of Spiderland (courtesy of Shellac’s Bob Weston) there are also outtakes and perviously unreleased demos, along with a coffee table-friendly photo book and the film Breadcrumb Trail, a feature-length documentary about the origins of both band and album. All the tracks are presented on CD and 180 gram vinyl. The whole thing is encased in a sleek, black box. It is a very sexy package. But is it any good? That last bit was rhetorical, by the way.

First things first; Spiderland remastered sounds incredible. The record was already perfect, but the audio spit and polish enhances the tracks to make them sound fresh and razor-sharp. I couldn’t even begin to tell you how many times I have listened to these songs over the years, but at the time of writing, I have played the album from start finish at least five times and loved every second of it all over again. The rickety, nocturnal vibe is still perfectly intact, it just sounds better than ever.

The main event, for this listener anyway, is all the stuff we’ve never heard before. Slint’s recorded output was sparse even when they were a going concern and as bassist Todd Brashear points out in the liner notes, his outfit “wasn’t a band with a lot of extra material left to dig up.” What there is, however, is fascinating. The track Pam (which follows the band’s tradition of naming songs after band member’s parents) is a Spiderland outtake which boasts a trademark creepy Slint intro before descending into a heads-down thrasher, and that’s before we get to the Holy Grail for Slint worshippers; post-Spiderland material which the band worked on in secret. There are two demos, both of which were works-in-progress which never saw completion, and even though they function as little more then sketches, they offer a tantalising glimpse of what might have been. Todd’s Song is a drifting instrumental while Brian’s Song is a lurching series of drum machine beats welded to the sort of guitars that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on early Tortoise albums. Whether or not Slint thought it was folly to try and capture lightning in a bottle twice is something we’ll just have to guess at. Another of the biggest surprises here is a live cover of Neil Young’s ‘Cortez The Killer’, played so straight it hurts, at a gig in Chicago in 1989.

The documentary Breadcrumb Trail is worthy of a feature by itself, and its inclusion here makes the box set a must-have. For all the mystique surrounding Spiderland, the film suggests that the band were just regular dudes (albeit with a left-of-centre aesthetic) growing up together who loved music and didn’t want much more other than to make the kind of songs that they themselves would want to hear. Apparently, according to one portion of the film, they also loved recording their own farts. Dispelling the band’s otherworldly aura was a risk, but all it really does it make them more human and endearing. There was magic at work, to be sure, but it was the kind of magic that can come from anywhere at any time.

So is it any good? Yes it fucking is. The Spiderland box set functions as several things all at once; a reissue, a deconstruction and an almost forensic study of creative genius. It draws a line under the band’s legacy but also reaffirms it. It’s an album I have heard more times than I can count, and it’s my album of the year. Beyond essential.