Slint: a hard name, suggesting stone, flint, a dark surface which reflects nothing but darkness. Is it because it refuses to reflect us that Spiderland is loved? Do we love it because it brings the unknown very close to us? Because it passes by us without allowing itself to be recognised according to the signs to which we are accustomed to classify our music?
Spiderland, enigmatic meteor, an album from the day after the last album is recorded, music from the other side of the end of time. Rigid, hard, austere, it gives us nothing we can accommodate. What words can one throw at this dark event? Unease? Disquiet? Above all, this is a sober album, it is dry, it opens a kind of desert through which it is difficult to pass.
Album without precedent and without successor.
2.
The singers of Modest Mouse and Arab Strap are burly, angry men who swig from wine bottles. They move from fearful sincerity to drunken laughter to ironic bonhomie and all the while tremble on the void. Marvellous to note thes elf-deprecating humour of the singers: men afraid to take themselves too seriously lest they usurp the void.
3.
The members of Explosions in the Sky are men interchangeable with anyone else, plaid shirted, bejeaned, and who speak between songs with simpleness and humility. Theirs is a music, unlike Slint’s, on this side of the end of time, music of the novas and shooting stars, of deafening roar that might be like the music Pythagoras claimed roared all around us.
Here is an impersonal joy, a correlate to the impersonal anguish of Slint. A music of the upper atmosphere, the fiery element where the aurora borealis burns. We were carried, the audience, into the ghostly light where the air is on fire.
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