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Codeine - ‘Wird’ from The White Birch (Sub Pop, 1994)
(w/ gtr by David Grubbs)
I am in the room, I am in the anteroom
So, your comparison for today is ‘slowcore’. Although neither this song nor ‘Anteroom’ are close to being typical examples - ‘Wird’ because it’s essentially a Slint song (albeit phrased rather differently, the same story told in a different instrumental ‘voice’), ‘Anteroom’ because it’s so full of melody, harmony, all those song-y things that are usually stripped away, or back, in a true slowcore song. Nevertheless, ‘Anteroom’ has that minimalist feel of the genre, where every guitar chord - the opening calling back to the sublimated folk of ‘California’ - both echoes in empty space and fills it up with a resonant beauty. ‘Wird’ is far starker, but its deconstructed tones nevertheless manage to convey the feel of a tune, its inner structure: which is what slowcore is all about.
“I can sense the ghost in the machine” is about finding the spiritual in the technical, the animating force in the material flesh. It’s also, variously, an illustration of the absurdity of Cartesian dualism, a popular ‘science’ book by Arthur Koestler, the title of a 1981 album by The Police, and the inspiration for the Japanese manga Ghost in the Shell. But here it carries a slippery irony, because it seems to promise hope “No one has to shriek/No one has to worry now” yet does so in a way that immediately suggests a reality that is the opposite. The personal ghost is maybe the key we wish we had to the world; but we can never be sure we have it, we’re never quite there.
“Who built
Who built this machine?
This mechanism
This misery”
Codeine, ‘Wird’
Codeine’s The White Birch seemed to me to be the worst possible album to listen to it in a bad mood, because its opening bars are so dull and leaden, and continue that way through most of the songs, that they just increase the feeling of numbness and separation: but now I’ve figured out that you just need to stick it out until the really heavy guitars come in, crushing everything before them in a crunchy mass of distortion - too one-directional and unvarying to be truly cathartic, but giving a momentary glimpse of that feeling of life, of pure animation; that ghost. And around that, exquisite emptiness - it turns out that the hammer blows are not just part of the machine, they’re its spirit too.
At this point in Past Life Martyred Saints, we’re already familiar with EMA’s vocal and song-writing style: I kind of feel like ‘California’ is the real first track, with ‘The Grey Ship’ has more of an extended prologue, which makes ‘Anteroom’ the introduction to the rest of the album. What that means is that the difference in style - foreshadowing ‘Coda’ and ‘Marked’ in its spacious intensity - can’t hide much, we still can predict the trajectory and the rhythm of the song as she sings it. In a certain embellished-slowcore fashion, there’s a gentle rise and fall of guitar and voice for the first third, before the drums kick in with quite a pronounced effect: again, very slowcore. Then the guitar builds up to an almost hummable crescendo, before dropping out to leave four solitary piano notes; then the voice comes back in, once, then double, and a while later, drums again: everything falls apart and then comes back together again - “If this time through we don’t get it right, I’ll come back to you in another life”.
