I started college in the fall of 1991, which means I was old enough to be into underground music, and young enough to be a dick about it. The year punk broke was a couple of years after I'd discovered Dinosaur Jr. and Sonic Youth in high school, and much longer after I'd put on hardcore shows in my dad's backyard as a teenager. I remember a winter meeting at the college radio station toward the start of 1992 where the station director and some other DJs were discussing the success of Nevermind, while I-- wearing a Laughing Hyenas shirt and still smelling like sweat from a Jesus Lizard show the night before-- stood there and shook my head. If I'd been even a year older or younger this would've played out differently. But at that time and place I cared more about Slint's Spiderland, My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, Jesus Lizard's Goat, Dinosaur Jr.'s Green Mind, and Sebadoh III in 1991 than I did Nirvana's game-changer. It's also why I was waiting for the New York slow-core trio Codeine to follow up their excellent 1990 debut, Frigid Stars.
In 1991, I naively thought Codeine were bigger than they actually were. I was in New Jersey, less than an hour from New York City, and traveled to the city (or Maxwell's in Hoboken or a dude's house in Princeton) to catch them whenever I could. A few friends and I even found a way to have our school pay them decently to come out and play in a lifeless student center. For this small group of punks, hardcore kids, indie rockers, and a sensitive metal dude named Adam, Codeine-- along with affiliated bands Bastro, Bitch Magnet, and eventually Seam-- were huge. We were kids into punk, metal, and flat-out noise, and we found something here to tug onto. It was a gateway. In retrospect, it's interesting how heavy all those bands were, when they also had a reputation for delicacy.
The thing people remember most about Codeine is that their music was very, very slow. And the tempo made it even more powerful. Unlike slow-core bands like Low or Red House Painters, Codeine were associated with Slint and the more abrasive Louisville scene, and brought a kind of post-punk dynamic to their music, no matter how fragile it could get. It was glaciers colliding. The band managed to distill everything to these specific, clean, spacious elements. It made sense that their dynamic final album, The White Birch, featured such snowy cover art: Not only did Codeine's music feel like ice, but unrelentingly sad-sack vocalist/bassist Stephen Immerwahr's eyes reminded me of pools of slush, and watching original drummer Chris Brokaw (who left the group after Barely Real to concentrate on his other band, Come) and then powerful final drummer Doug Scharin (Rex, June of 44, HiM) lay down these quarter-speed beats, always looked to me like someone drowning. Their only real overlap on Sub Pop as far as speed was Earth, but Codeine were doing something quite different.
Numero's new deluxe reissuing of the New York trio's three major releases are long overdue, both as a reminder and a history lesson. The overall collection's been remastered and titled When I See the Sun, something Codeine did not do very often. The label did a great job with the set: 1990's Frigid Stars, 1992's Barely Real EP, and 1994's The White Birch are available here as three double LPs that come with CDs of the same material. Each is packed with Peel Sessions, live and alternate takes, demos, compilation tracks, and B-sides. The albums all include extensive liner notes and essays by important voices from that period like the New York guitarist Alan Licht and Chemical Imbalance's Mike McGonigal (also a Pitchfork contributor), along with distilled oral histories.
Codeine opened their first record with a song called "D" and the words, "D for effort/ D for intent/ D because you pay the rent/ D for love/ D for insight." And their work doesn't get much more cheerful after that. But Immerwahr sings those lines and the almost uplifting chorus ("I want you to need me/ Not to feed me") with a gentle grace, fleshed out by guitarist John Engle's simple, spacious chords, and Brokaw's equally open drumming. They didn't change their sound much across their three official releases: Frigid Stars was the most surprising because it was the first, and when the six-song Barely Real EP emerged a couple of years later, it felt masterful in its compression of what we'd come to expect from them. By the time they got to The White Birch, their most Slint-like moment, they were adding a few more wrinkles, like bigger, more melodic guitars (as typified on the gigantic, nautical-themed opener "Sea"), and Scharin could play even slower and heavier than Brokaw. But the music was just as focused on the original set of concerns.
The group was so good at paring down their music that a number of the bonuses that appear on these sets, while fun, serve mostly to show you that Immerwahr and co. included the right material on their records and had a good feel for the correct tempos and aesthetics. I liked hearing the almost black-metal feedback of the demo for Frigid Stars' "Second Chance" and the fuzzed-out, backward-guitar of the "Cave-In" demo (yes, the Boston band got their name from that one), but the originals are miles beyond these curiosities. That said, some non-album tracks call for repeat listens, like the gentle, warm "Summer Dresses", the B-side live staple "Broken Hearted Wine", and an acoustic take on "Pea", the final track on Frigid Stars as well as the B-side to a split with Bitch Magnet.
There are also covers: slow-core takes on Joy Division's "Atmosphere" and Unrest's "Hydroplane". Neither of these is surprsing; the group's interests and affliliations weren't difficult to track down. Frigid Stars' "New Year's" was co-written with Bitch Magnet's Sooyoung Park and later recorded with his gentler post-Bitch Magnet band, Seam. David Grubbs played the solo piano on "W", a track on Barely Real, and showed up again as a guitarist for The White Birch's "Tom" and "Wird" (a reworking of the earlier "W"). Bitch Magnet's Jon Fine added "noisy guitar" to Barely Real's "Jr.", and the EP ended with a cover of MX-80 Sound's "Promise of Love" (in 1992, I admittedly thought it was a Codeine original). They thanked "Louisville" in the liner notes for The White Birch.
As important as Codeine were to me personally, and as influential as they were on the scene at that time, and on bands after (Mogwai, Low), they're a group many don't seem to remember. Maybe because Immerwahr, always the face for the band, basically dropped out of music after he ran out of ideas for Codeine (he now works as a research scientist). But there's something especially fascinating about how people rewrite or misremember history. When I see folks in their 20s writing about the music of the 90s, they often get the little things wrong, or are writing about one-person's interpretation as though that's how it was. It makes sense that the smaller details would slip through the cracks. And while I admit it's hard separating my personal history from Codeine, the group's output really does stand up; they were more important in the early 90s than most people realize today, and maybe that will change here.
