The Decibel Tolls

When you take the LSAT, many of the questions you answer require you to make inferences and deductions based only what’s on paper, essentially asking you to forget any outside knowledge or understanding you have. Let’s take that approach with Slint’s Spiderland. If you knew nothing else about the group or their seminal album, you wouldn’t have a lot to go by outside the strange bobbing heads staring through your soul on the front. From the music, you could glean the group had interests or training in jazz, classical, psych, punk, and noise, and had a weird thing with pirates and insects. From the imagery and album inset, all you would know about the context of Spiderland is that they had Palace Brother Will Oldham go swimming with them one day at the Utica Quarry in southern Indiana (and took pictures), the band prefers you listen to this on vinyl (as stated on the CD and cassette copies), and they were no longer interested in mumbling narratives by themselves.  The latter is what seems most interesting to a lot of people. That makes sense considering the band melted down either during or shortly after Spiderland’s release and the fact that, other than the track titles, it’s the only real, tangible information included on the album cover.

interested female vocalists write
1864 douglas blvd. louisville, ky 40205

My apartment is about a seven to ten minute bike ride from this address. It was a nice Saturday afternoon, I was listening to the Slint EP, and thought, what the hell? Let’s go on a vision quest to find the Slint house! Continue reading ‘The House That Slint Built (Perhaps)’