Yet another daily excerpt from Cold World…

Let us now take a musical example: “The White Birch”, the third and final album by the now largely forgotten 1990s Sub Pop band Codeine. Codeine played a deeply mournful music, impressively slowly. When their original drummer left the band, they reputedly had great difficulty in auditioning for another who could play consistently at their speed. Most drummers would succumb sooner or later to the urge to inject some life into the proceedings by speeding up, getting louder or introducing additional flourishes and fills. (Drummers are not known for their asceticism). The dynamics of Codeine’s music were the physics of its world: a world in the grip of entropy, in which everything is running down. The title of their first album, “Frigid Stars” captured both the glacial brilliance of Codeine’s sound and – paradoxically for a collection of intensely introverted songs about failed and failing relationships – its cosmic scope.
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One possible response to “Smoking Room” is to hear it as a dramatization of Codeine’s rejection of rock music’s vital machismo, turning away from its “smoking room” (or “locker room”) ambience of exaggerated gestures and swaggering priapic boasting towards a dreary – yet fascinating – emotional terrain. In place of rock’s all-conquering lust for life, Codeine’s music enacts a stark resilience, pointing to the possibility of beauty, hope and love even when the libido is utterly depleted, when every imaginable material and emotional resource has been stripped away. In many respects, “The White Birch” is a painfully depressing album to listen to, but its final moments are both beautiful and consoling, opening out onto the glimmering “now” of a cosmos in suspended animation.

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