New York band Codeine made minor waves on the alternative Rock scene both in the UK and the States in the early Nineties. They featured a bit in the Melody Maker at the time and appealed to me because they did that quiet loud slowcore thing that was gathering vogue at the time. Or perhaps just because I was a bit too intense for my own good at that stage in my life.
Solemn young men and women who didn't move very much onstage underlining their intense, profound condition, if this wasn't immediately apparent the moment they shuffled onstage refusing to address or possibly even acknowledge the audience. See Galaxie 500, Slint and Mercury Rev. This was art.
This whole sensibility is very easy to mock but I still like a bit of it thirty years on, and have enjoyed listening to Codeine's second album Dessau, which was re-released a couple of years back, a few times in the last fortnight.
This kind of almost monastic soul-bearing was really the done thing for the pure at heart and hipper than thou throughout the Nineties. No compromise to such bourgeois constraints of melody or choruses for these slim, pale types. This was important stuff.
Despite its essential po-faced quality though, there's much to recommend it. Also one I'm sure that many of it who seized on it first time round will listen to it again as a key record in their happy / morose youth.
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