Replay: Slint, Spiderland, 1991

One imagines a coven somewhere in the Midwest in which bed-headed indie kids gather at an abandoned barn to genuflect at the patchwork altar of Slint. Huh? Never heard of Slint? There's hope for your soul yet, heathen. Slint is considered by many crix and nerds to be post-rock's belly button, the origin point of so much beautiful noise that led (with college radio as midwife) to the genre's reign in the '90s. Deploying dissonance and a clumsy, crawling vibe, Slint is the band invoked when people want to break out the hipstick and outcool your love of Pavement with something even more obscure. Yeah, yeah, Slint is a seminal post-rock act whose boyish visages deserve to be carved on Mount Rushmore, blah blah, but, jeezus, is Spiderland really all that? Respecting originators doesn't mean you have to like them, and Spiderland, while a nice document of post-rock's early beginnings as it fumbled its way to discovering the range of its powers, isn't quite worth its weight in cobwebs.

"Breadcrumb Trail" kicks things off with explosive promise, a bipolar pop tune that goes from a pretty shoegazer murmur to a layered nova of guitar attack spiced with lines that sizzle like live wires. What's beautiful about "Breadcrumb Trail" is a willingness to engage in the lost art of musical elaboration: You get the sense these kids from Kentucky are testing the song's boundaries, even if it's with a limited toolbox of repetition, change and tonal variety. Maybe all memory is nostalgia; for some reason, "Breadcrumb" is the song I most strongly and fondly associate with Slint, and paint the band with brushstrokes of skinny-kid bedroom genius and underdog counterpunch.

Yet track two, "Nosferatu Man," marks a step down into a basement of musical navel-picking that's at best passably interesting, at worst maddening. It employs the same dynamic--lurk and ambush--as "Breadcrumb Trail," and it unfortunately presages a fit of enfeebled imagination that makes the remainder of Spiderland--from the self-engrossed strumfest of "Don, Aman," to the muddy grumble of "Good Morning, Captain"--more exercises in budding musical ego than anything else. Sorry to piss on your altar, aging rumple-rockers, but your mini-God is dead.--Andrew Kiraly