Wednesday, September 8, 2010

1990: "Cave-In", Codeine

Alright, done now with vacation and vacation-related activities (itinerary planning, building up of alcohol tolerance, etc) so it's time to turn once again to my sixth or seventh great love, this blog. I'll try to knock out at least one or two entries a day from here on out... at least until my next vacation.

Today we pay blog service to the New York band Codeine, a group commonly described as leaders and innovators in the nearly synonymous orbits of the "slowcore" and "sadcore" scenes [ed. note: even though I'm completely on board with breaking things down into genre neologisms - can't fucking stand when musicians say "we just play good old rock & roll, maaaaan!" - there are fewer more annoying trends than the one which says, "hey, wouldn't it be clever to take something non-violent and repressed, rob the term 'hardcore' of its testosterone-laden suffix and, with it, conjure up new terminology which renders the twee badass? And keep on doing it over and over again for at least twenty years?" Nonetheless, in spite of my grave misgivings I am duty bound to report any parlance that has survived the test of time as nomenclature of choice].

Codeine's sound was glacially slow, and often dense in the manner of the shoegaze bands, but other than that there were none of the psych or Britpop leanings of their overseas counterparts. In fact, theirs was a more freeform avant garde haze that doesn't translate well to genre tropes at all. Hear, then, the music:

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