LaRM day 83 (Codeine)

Not much listening today so all we've got are a few records by the undisputed kings of the slowcore scene, Codeine. I really, really loved the Codeine records at the time - they fitted absolutely perfectly into my completely solipsistic worldview and helped considerably to foster that all important "poor me" mentality, it's great stuff. Dense, gruellingly slow-paced and bass heavy, their songs are hymns to self-indulgence and they work beautifully as such. It's grand, spacious stuff which suggests endless everyday misery without being too crass about it. The back cover of first album Frigid Stars (1990) shows a young man lying on a bed with a blanket over his head. Yep, that about sums it up, it's small time depression, not grandstanding misery, but musically it's played out like high drama. The 'Pickup Song'/'3 Angels' 7" that was released a month or two before Frigid Stars set the stall out, being two songs of sluggish, indolent miserablism, but which had killer melodies buried in the gloom. Bearing in mind everything moves at such a snail's pace it's surprising how melodic Codeine's music could be - this stuff bears no relation whatsoever to things like Earth for instance. Codeine play slow because slow is how the songs should be played, not because it affords them particular heaviosity. Still it's pretty testing stuff nonetheless. The mini-LP that followed, Barely Real (1992) is more of the same, and the title is extremely telling because the music almost drags itself to a standstill some of the time, while still wrenching out some semblance of a broken melody. It's sort of a cross between beautiful music and an endurance test. There's none of Low's glacial beauty for instance, or Navigator's reaching-out, it's simply stated and simply rendered personal angst, and it really works very well. It does have one glaring anomoly though in 'W' which is a David Grubbs solo piano piece which doesn't fit with the rest of the material at all and belongs on one of Grubbs' Gastr Del Sol albums.

Second, and final, album The White Birch (1994) was preceded by the 'Tom'/'Something New' single which heralded, if not exactly a change of sound, certainly a more direct relationship with melody. The White Birch has, for the first time, some genuinely lovely songs on it. The pace is the same, the song structures are essentially the same, but the mood has changed from angry angst to resigned angst, and this tweak allows for a more graceful approach to the sedate misery on offer. It's a really good album and if you've the patience to go with it, it's an invitingly personal one.