Show review: Codeine at Brighton Music Hall
Temporarily reunited purveyors of glacial tempos and introspective sadness, Codeine, played their first Boston show in eighteen years at Brighton Music Hall Saturday night.
Over the course of two full length albums and an EP, Codeine’s formula as a band changed very little. Sparse but forceful drums, plodding bass lines, half-spoken, half-sung vocals, and a guitar alternating between gently-picked melodies and massive chords ringing with distortion. Codeine represents the antithesis of rock and roll posturing, and the logical end of the power-trio format. The indie rock canon considers Codeine a part of the slowcore movement, alongside bands like Red House Painters and Low. Like their contemporaries, Codeine produced music that was exceptionally slow and exceptionally sad; the soundtrack to many lonely nights and bouts of self-pity. Codeine would take less of a quiet, folk-tinged approached to the genre though, favoring a sound that skirted aggression but never allowed itself the indulgence. Listening to them is akin to watching explosions in slow motion: simultaneously beautiful and crushing. It’s an experience they convey rather brilliantly as a live band, even after all these years.
Songwriter/guitarist and former Come member Thalia Zedek opened the show with a set unfortunately mired by various sound issues. Normally performing with a four piece band, Zedek was reduced to only a keyboard and an electric viola as accompaniment. Her rhythmic, blues-inflected guitar playing stood out, but everything else was drowned by the viola, and the group seemed to have trouble holding the songs together without a rhythm section. I can imagine it being a much better set on a different night.
Codeine, consisting of bassist/vocalist Stephen Immerwahr, drummer Chris Brokaw and guitarist John Engle, greeted the audience as unassumingly as you might expect. The soft-spoken Immerwahr offered, “We are Codeine, from New York” before the band opened their set with “D,” the first song from their first record. “D” is essentially Codeine in microcosm. The restrained, defeated-sounding verses give way to an abrasively aching chorus, which rapidly dissolves back into the quiet from whence it came. It’s one of the band’s finest songs, and an appropriate opener. The remainder of the setlist would consist of an even mix from Frigid Stars, The White Birch and the Barely Real EP, with a couple of rarities thrown in for good measure. They played the hits, insofar as this type of band can have ‘hits.’ “Cigarette Machine,” “Sea,” “Jr,” and “Pea” (the Frigid Stars closer from which the band’s new retrospective box set When I See the Sun derives its title) were all played with precise reverence to the album originals.
There isn’t much variety in Codeine’s sound, and thus it produces a certain trance-like effect during prolonged exposure. The band draws you into its slow motion universe, wherein you’re enveloped by every strike of Engle’s guitar and sent reeling by every resonating shockwave from Brokaw’s drums. This isn’t the type of show where the audience dances or even sings along. Most of the crowd stared in hushed reverence for the hour and a quarter set, only indulging in the slightest sway or head bob to indicate that they were hearing anything at all. Blame it on the general atmosphere of the music, but blame it in part, too, on the fact that Codeine is one of those semi-legendary nineties bands that no one expected a reunion from. They disbanded in 1994, and only Brokaw has stayed active in the music community since. To see them on a stage together in 2012 is somewhat surreal.
Numero Group’s remastering/reissuing of the band’s catalog in the When I See the Sun set seems the main motivation for these reunion shows, and it’s evident that the band will dissolve once again when they’re over. In the vein of fellow reunited bands like Pavement or Archers of Loaf, this is an affair solely for revisiting old songs because people still love them. The show occasionally took on the tone of a history lesson, as Immerwahr explained the origins of song titles or remarked about not knowing that the band’s final pre-break up show in Boston would actually be their last, and about being “ok with it this time.” Yes, this was a nostalgia show on all counts, but it was also the best possible nostalgia show Codeine could have performed. The band’s legacy remains intact, heightened by the fact that Immerwahr, Engle and Brokaw can revisit these songs after nearly twenty years and still have them resonate so strongly.
Thalia Zedek:
Codeine:
