Slint - London Forum - 2/3/05
4/5
By: Thomas Hannan
Think of this as 'Slint: A Defence'. That'll make it seem nice and intellectual. Often, how, who with and where you experience with a band can carry as much weight with regards your thoughts on the show as their actual performance. This wouldn't have been worth half as many of the hours of pondering it generated without the marvellous discussion of its various merits and shortcomings that sneaked into the overly lengthy between-song gaps and suffocated the possibility of any other topic for the journey home. Needless to say, opinions differed. Take this as one side of the story. The other is around somewhere.
One thing that's agreed upon, for better or worse, is that Slint are note-perfect tonight, three shows back into their brief reunion. It's shockingly accurate. Yes, at times, it is just like listening to the record. Why this is a bad thing is unclear, as this is the thrill of hearing a record unfold that can't be achieved in any other way, the danger lurking in the possibility of human error rearing its head, the payoff coming in the fact that it never does. Not once. The only real noticeable variation from the sounds of those works everyone here has clutched to their bosoms since the band first departed and the sound we hear tonight comes in the form of the 'Tweez' material, a record they were reportedly a little unhappy with anyway. Tonight, it sounds cleaner, more precise, packs a punch rather than a dull thud. It sounds better. You get the feeling you're witnessing precisely how Slint want to be heard.
Granted, there is a detachment from the audience that, oft, borders on the robotic. But there's a similar joy in the cold, calculated distance of it that we'd imagine comes from watching Kraftwerk. There is passion here, it's in the attention to detail, inherent in the uniquely arresting songs in the first place, in the screams of 'I miss you!' that send us on our way. There just isn't camaraderie. It seems that simply isn't the way things are done. At a guess, their reasons for standing deathly still are similar. No need for any large degree of movement - just not their style. It is brimming with passion though, if only because it'd be impossible to care this much, to play with such single-mindedness and purpose, to make sure that everything sounded exactly as intended, if these songs didn't mean the absolute world to you. They care - they've just got a funny way of showing it.
It can occasionally transcend all of this. 'Don Aman' is terrifying, 'Good Morning Captain' still unsurpassed in the past fifteen years of music. Largely, it's tremendous, no argument. For most of the youngsters here though, Slint have been more than just a band, because for the majority, for the bulk of their music-appreciating lives, Slint never were a band. They were an entity, a bodiless reputation, a kind of enigma. Perhaps that's where this took a little bit of getting used to. Here they were, Slint - just a band. But honestly - what a band.
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