Who named Spiderland the 12th best album of the 1990s?
Spiderland received widespread critical acclaim from music critics, including Spin, NME, and The Village Voice. In a contemporary review for Melody Maker, Steve Albini, producer of Slint's 1989 album Tweez, gave the album ten stars and called it "a majestic album, sublime and strange, made more brilliant by its simplicity and quiet grace." Albini found its unadorned production impeccable and said that it vividly captures McMahan and Pajo's playing so well that their guitars "seem to hover in space directly past the listener's nose", while "the incredibly precise-yet-instinctive drumming has the same range and wallop it would in your living room." Select noted that the band's popularity in the college circuit was "probably due to the college circuit celebrity status of their drummer – Shannon Doughton, aka Britt Walford, the only male member of the 'all-female' indie supergroup The Breeders". Their review noted the multiple listens it may take to appreciate it, acknowledging the album as "immediate as a snail trail to hell, 'Spiderland' needs several plays to burn its way into your consciousness, but when it does..."In a retrospective review for AllMusic, Mark Deming said that Spiderland is "one of the most important indie albums of the '90s" and a "singular achievement" which found the band "working with dynamics that made the silences every bit as much presence as the guitars and drums, manipulating space and time as they stretched out and juggled time signatures, and conjuring melodies that were as sparse and fragmented as they were beautiful". Robert Christgau was less enthusiastic and wrote that, despite their "sad-sack affect", Slint are actually "art-rockers without the courage of their pretensions" with poor lyrics. In The New Rolling Stone Album Guide, Rolling Stone journalist Mac Randall felt that the album's music lacks songform, even though it sounds more accessible than Tweez: "[t]he absence of anything resembling a tune continues to nag."In 2003, Pitchfork wrote of Spiderland: "a heady, chilling listen; the irregularity of its hypnotic melodies, fractured beats and mismatched lyrics demand a new kind of appreciation, independent of traditional notions of songcraft. With its half-mumbled, half-hollered vocals, deliberate percussion and drone-gone-aggressive guitars, Spiderland's urgency is almost traumatic to swallow: despondency never tasted so real." They named it the twelfth best album of the 1990s. In 2014, Spiderland was reissued as a box set, featuring 14 previously unreleased tracks, and received widespread critical acclaim; it holds an average score of 99 out of 100 at Metacritic, based on 11 reviews from mainstream publications.
Pitchfork