Music

This Album Changed My Life: Slint – Spiderland (1991)

Scottish songwriter Aidan Moffat on an influential American guitar record that helped start post-rock

Aidan Moffat: “I love the spoken, cryptic storytelling and the gently sung heartache.”

Niall Byrne
Sat Jul 14 2018 - 05:00

I remember lying in my bedroom with the curtains drawn on a sunny spring day and listening to Slint's Spiderland and having my mind blown.

I was almost 18 and still at Falkirk High School, and for the umpteenth Monday in a row, I phoned the record store Fopp in Edinburgh from the payphone at school reception – I'd been waiting for the album to come out for ages. It still hadn't arrived, but they'd received a white label LP promo and offered to sell it to me, so I walked straight out of the building, jumped on a train to the city, bought it, and returned in time to meet my friend at the gates after school.

We took it home, set the scene in darkness, and were transported to a world of carnivals, vampires, devastating break-ups, and ghostly sailors.

I love the spoken, cryptic storytelling and the gently sung heartache, and it remains one of the most unique arrangements of the guitars-bass-drums rock standard ever – gorgeous, strange, fragile guitar lines lead to emotive explosions with jazz time signatures and full-on rock screaming. It’s exactly what a 17-year-old me wanted to hear, and I felt a great affinity with these young guys from far across the sea in Louisville, Kentucky, and my love for the album hasn’t dimmed since.

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Aidan Moffat & RM Hubbard play Roisin Dubh as part of the Galway International Arts Festival on 23rd July 23rd; The Grand Social, Dublin on July 24th; and Black Box, Belfast on July 25th.

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