Free Slint's Spiderland by Scott Tennent Page A

same open, roomy sound of “Glenn,” and Walford’s drumming remains stark, disciplined, and minimal — a far cry from the bounce of the Pixies’ David Lovering and a continued maturation from Walford’s busier, jazzier drumming on
Tweez
.
    In the six months between recording
Pod
and its release, Walford’s dedication to Slint only grew, as it did with the other three members. Though Slint did not play out or practice much between September 1989 and May 1990, wheels turned nonetheless. Walford and McMahan’s friend Corey Rusk agreed torelease Slint’s next album. He also promised to arrange a more substantial tour, including Europe, in support of the new record. Suddenly Slint had become a serious enterprise.
    Perhaps recalling the frustrations of Squirrel Bait’s experience while on Homestead, McMahan quickly surmised that the model Slint had worked under for the past two years, functioning only during school breaks, was untenable. “Brian and Britt kept pushing things along and making us a productive band,” Pajo said. “We suddenly had a deadline. It was a Touch and Go record, and we all loved Touch and Go records. We understood that it was a big deal.”
    As Pajo and Brashear’s school year ended, all four members returned to Louisville to prepare for their next album, which they planned to record in the fall for a release after the new year, to coincide with a European tour. Pajo and Brashear both agreed to take a full year off of school in order to focus completely on Slint. “That was the big
Spiderland
year,” Brashear said. “I was in an audio engineering program [at Indiana University], and the program was pretty hard to get into. I had to convince my professor that this had a lot to do with what I was studying.”
    They spent the summer practicing intensively, five days a week in six- or eight-hour stretches. Brashear remembered the exhausting schedule: “I had this job at a wood wall-covering plant in Indiana [just across the river from Louisville]. I’d work from 7:30 to 3:30,then I would go home, take a nap, eat dinner, and go to practice. It was grueling.” It was rigorous, but to hear the band members talk about it, the practice space is where they thrived. Given their small discography and rare live appearances — Pajo estimated to
Punk Planet
that Slint probably played just thirty shows in four years — most of the bandmates’ memories are wrapped up in their practices. “It was almost like the practices were more important than the final product,” Pajo told me, echoing a sentiment voiced by McMahan and Walford to
Alternative Press
in 2005.
    The band immersed themselves in the songwriting process. A year earlier Slint was already playing four of the songs that would appear on
Spiderland
. In the summer of 1990, however, the band revisited each song with new vigor, analyzing every note and transition. Pajo told me that “it was all about practicing and working out those details. You can see how we could spend a couple of years trying to get all the details right. It seemed like even if the most logical answer was the one we began with, we still had to try every option to go full circle, on every decision . . . We could spend three days of practicing trying to find this micro-second between two basslines. It would be a really small detail but it would be important enough to us to spend that much time on it.” That level of attention was not natural to Pajo, who told me that he’s never been in another band situation, from the Palace Brothers to Tortoise to Zwan to his own solo material, that examined every nuance ofits songs to the degree that Slint did. “I think a lot of that is partly because Brian was so detail-oriented. He brought out the OCD in Britt and I as well.”
    McMahan was extremely critical of both his own ideas and those of his bandmates. His constant examination of every note, chord, and transition, according to Pajo, forced everyone to raise their game. “That