Codeine - In Praise of Slowness

The Slint, as has often happened, played their part. Codeine watched and listened. Contemporaries of the masters of "Spiderland", they managed, whether deliberately or not, to absorb the necessary lessons and turned their camera toward something else. With terrifying precision, slow-core was born.

From that moment on, Codeine became influential, parents to numerous offspring, more or less legitimate. But even among those genetically akin to them, none can match their worth.

John Engle's guitar, roughened by a dissonant sense of drama, the funereal bass physiologically tied to Stephen Immerwhar's aching voice, and the pulsing tolls of Chris Brokaw. This was the original core of the band, which emerged in Chicago in 1990 (the year before "Spiderland") with the album Frigid Stars, released on Sub Pop even though it had originally been slated for Glitterhouse. The impact was immediate: slowness pushed to excess, the ballad form transfigured by ultimate despair, narcolepsy turned into music. The album's opener, "D", is the manifesto of a new idea of music, descended from a songwriting tradition tied to Tim Buckley as much as to Neil Young, yet relentless in severing any kinship with other genres. At a time when fast music dominated (the epic sweep of grunge), Codeine flipped the perspective, exalting a slowed-down conception of sound. Recorded over two separate weekends in a friend's basement, Frigid Stars reaches the heights of essentialism, where every addition is refused. These are sad litanies ("New Year's"), at times abrasive ("Sigarette Machine"), emotionally turbulent ("Pickup Song"), streaked with absolute intensity ("Pea"). In these tracks one can trace the traits that would go on to influence Low as much as Black Heart Procession, Bedhead as much as Red House Painters, right up to the present day with Calla and Dakota Suite.

In 1992 came the EP Barely Real, again on Sub Pop. David Grubbs, at the time in Gastr Del Sol, contributes, and the band's uniqueness is confirmed by a piano piece simply titled "W". Shortly after, Brokaw leaves the group (he would go on to join Come with Thalia Zedek before closing a kind of hypothetical circle with New Year) and Doug Scharin steps in, a figure destined to influence the entire post-rock scene with Rex, June Of '44 and HiM.

1994 is the year of the band's second and final album. White Birch (Sub Pop) is, if anything, even more extreme than its predecessor. The quality remains excellent, with an exasperated stretching-out into a dimension made of fragility and disintegration. "Sea", the opening track, overwhelms with a dark unease that runs past seven minutes, smothering any outside sensation not tied to a pained existentialism. A tangible melancholy hangs over the whole album, with occasional eruptions making the imagery it creates even more tormented. It is relentless music, one that achieves an absurd physicality despite being, in theory, entirely cerebral. It's the rough patina of emotions crushed by an inability to communicate.

With Scharin's new career taking off, Codeine seemed to vanish into that black hole they had so brilliantly built. In 1995 they would release their rendition of "Atmosphere" on the Joy Division tribute album "A Means To An End".

After almost thirty years of silence, with no official breakup ever announced, in 2022 the Chicago label Numero Group retrieved material recorded in 1992 at Dessau Studio in New York, from the sessions that followed the release of Frigid Stars. The album, titled simply Dessau, consists of eight tracks, representing the first recorded versions of songs that later surfaced — in different forms — on Barely Real and The White Birch, having been shelved at the time due to Immerwhar's dissatisfaction with them. Decades later, the album still stands as an admirable artifact, one that revives the memory of a band as essential as Codeine and traces the evolutionary path linking the beginning and the end of the New York band's brief but significant existence.

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