Every tale about the band Slint begins with retrospect. A couple guys who’d known each other a long time got together in Loo-uh-ville, KY, to make a band named after a goldfish. On their second album they created one of the greatest LPs in rock music, Spiderland.

You know the name. This album has been cited by 100,000 writers trying to explain Kurt Cobain’s music. After Spiderland, Slint disintegrated. Didn’t even tour to support it.

Photo of Slint at Bimbo's by the gracious Flicker user Lightthe.

Yet even as the band slipped away, Spiderland grew through the music community. The album continued to spread and be passed along until it was appreciated as a masterpiece. Now, after much pleading from fans, they’re back – and back on tour playing their magnum opus front to back. They came through Bimbo's 365 Club in North Beach last Monday.

Why is this album so acclaimed? How does Spiderland fit into the rock canon? How would you explain it to your Dad? Can you avoid using the word “angular"* to describe it? Well, sure. How ‘bout this; let’s compare it to Jonathan Demme’s movie The Silence Of The Lambs.

* 14,200 hits on Google for "angular + Slint" at last check.

After the jump: the movie comparison, followed by the review of the concert at Bimbo’s, with plenty more pictures. And video!

The two pieces have certain similarities in their respective fields that can help in attempting to explain Spiderland:

Each are part of a time and yet outside it. Hopeless and yet doggedly not. An arm’s length examination of human discomfort, a genre piece deconstructed and reassembled with such skill that it becomes greater than its parts. Observations made all the more uncomfortable by the cold unblinking distance at which they’re told. And that icy distance actually magnifies the humanity that each piece is scrutinizing. Whispers carrying greater weight than any louder sound. Each are works of unwavering confidence capped by a understated ending that completes its arc to astounding effect; striking at the heart, the brain, the body. And later, returning to haunt through dreams.

Each are so good that they are taken for granted. Thick tones of menace looming beneath the surface of the everyday. Dire, and yet strangely uplifting. Now, how could either of these pieces be uplifting at all? Through release.

And building tension to release is what Slint does best.

The clear pictures are by Flicker user Lightthe. The granular, impressionistic cellphone pictures are by SFist Christopher Rogers.

Brian McMahan during "breadcrumb trail."

Slint were crossing the nation on their second tour since their reformation to curate the 2005 All Tomorrow’s Parties festival's first weekend in England. The band arrayed themselves across the multi-tiered stage at Bimbo's.


David Pajo works that I <3 KY shirt...

As the music washed over the crowd, the standing members of the band barely moved. Their expressions were as ones of concentration, as enrapt as the audience was. After each song, the appreciative applause would stretch out unusually long for any rock show short of a Tom Waits or Sleater-Kinney.


...and his Fender.



It was a surprise to many that Britt Walford sings "nosferatu man" while drumming.


Pajo and Britt Walford's drumset.

Before launching into the song "for dinner...", singer/guitarist Brian McMahan commented dryly on how he liked the "dinner theater setting" of Bimbo's. These were his only words to the audience during the evening other than "thank you."


Walford stepped out from behind the drumset to perform "don, aman"

McMahan set up his microphone on the edge of the stage. When he would reach for a note with his voice, he would rise on his toes, and stretch his shoulders back, looking for all the world like a marionette being hoisted up by his string.


McMahan tells the story.

Here is downloadable video footage shot by Christopher Rogers of the end of Spiderland's final song "good morning, captain": SLINT_VIDEO_1, SLINT_VIDEO_2.

The files are playable using the Quicktime player.

Do you have more photos of this night? Feel free to add links to them in the Comments section.