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	SLINT AT THE ROXY INDIE-ROCK RECITAL

"Fifteen years between shows, and 15 minutes between songs," joked a cute twentysomething named Heather who’d driven up from Providence to catch the now legendary Louisville band Slint on their current reunion tour at the Roxy Sunday night. She was exaggerating on both counts: it’s been just 14 years since Slint broke up, and the strange silent breaks the band took between each of the 13 songs they played lasted only a minute or two. But that’s a long time to leave an eager audience waiting, especially in the absence of anything resembling a "hello" from singer Brian McMahon, who eschewed the convention of standing center stage facing forward in favor of positioning himself stage right, perpendicular to the crowd. If he’d been playing guitar, as he had when Slint were a going concern from 1987 to 1991, it might have just been his way of maximizing his interplay with guitarist David Pajo and drummer Britt Walford, the two other original Slints who’d signed on for the tour, along with bassist Brian Cook, a long-time FOS (friend of Slint). But Michael McMahon, who remained almost hidden behind his older sibling, had been retained to handle Brian’s half of the barbed-wire tangle of often elegantly intertwined guitars so crucial to Slint’s austere yet complex arrangements, as Cook filled the cavernous voids between Pajo and the younger McMahon’s six-string outbursts with big, booming bass notes.

It was all just a little odd, from the meditative minutes of silence that followed each song to the fact that Brian wasn’t playing guitar in order to, as Pajo had explained to me over the phone a week and a half earlier, "concentrate on vocals" — the joke being that many of Slint’s signature songs are filled with long, winding instrumental passages, and that McMahon’s vocals are mostly soft-spoken verses followed by occasional bouts of screaming. The band opened the set with a stark instrumental of abstractly layered guitar textures punctuated by furious bouts of muscular pounding by Walford. Yet once they kicked into "Breadcrumb Trail," a signature tune from Slint’s epic 1991 album Spiderland (Touch and Go) full of tricky tempo shifts, oblique chordings, undulating arpeggios, rich harmonic overtones, and McMahon’s spoken-word poetics, a warm wave of pleasure seemed to wash over the reverent crowd. After all, here we were in the presence of bona fide indie-rock legends who, with a studied virtuosity usually reserved for conservatory recitals, were demonstrating their mastery of a vocabulary they’d invented for the post–Sonic Youth underground a decade and a half ago. If the masters needed a few minutes to compose themselves between songs, so be it.