Live music - Slint
Quiet music played loudly is as good a description as any for Slint’s highly influential instrumental rock. Guitars strum and shudder; at right angles to the rest of the band, a man — not quite a vocalist — intones something deep and indecipherable. Then, clang!, an FX pedal is pressed, the volume soars, and great swathes of feedback come crashing and roiling from the speakers.
In 2014, such a progression — from the soft to the roaring — sounds perfectly formulaic. Scottish post-rockers Mogwai have built a career on these foundations as, in a more esoteric way, have Iceland’s Sigur Rós. However, Slint, a loosely marshalled group of friends from Louisville, Kentucky, arguably created the cliche with their 1991 album, Spiderland, which may be thought of as the instrumental equivalent of Velvet Underground and Nico, or Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
