Review Summary: seasonal depression: the album
It’s turning winter in my part of the world. We’re in the middle of a slow slide into chilly weather as the sun falls closer and closer to setting when the workday ends. Codeine’s second and final album,
The White Birch, feels at home in the cold. It comes on like hypothermia, more like a numbness than a warmth, lulling you off to thought and sleep.
In the mid-90s, the three-part band helped bring identity to the “slowcore” genre, alongside peers like Low, Red House Painters, and Slint. Codeine sounded familiar, but they also sounded like something that was new, a foreign accent to the indie-rock language--bleak, contemplative, stripped down, intentional.
The White Birch trudges along. Everything is slow, like walking through deep snow. You’ll find yourself consciously taking a breath, almost waiting around for the next words or notes. The music is plodding and obsessive, like the feeling of a panic attack coming on. Similar to Slint’s
Spiderland, the writing here isn’t uninspired or lazy, but personal and human-scale. Codeine isn’t trying to craft sprawling, singalong, rock ballads, but the opposite. Like the lonely white birch on the cover, the album represents isolation. The art doesn’t capture a full-panorama, snowy landscape, but instead a focused frame…a gaze at the details.
The White Birch is a colorless album, filled with narratives of black and white, greys, and silvers. The opening line, “
a white ship sails on a black sea,” flows like an ink painting of a depressed mind being swallowed up by the ocean while captive to its currents. This idea of black and white and contrasts seeps into the music production. Though the tempo is sedate, the instrumentation is energized and weighty. The percussion has substance and intent behind every hit. Little full-band flourishes billow up out of nowhere and die down just as discreetly. It’s an album about emphases, where everything washes over like a monotone daydream until certain moments dissolve into focus and stick to your subconscious. Like the musical structure, the lyrics throughout are bleak but carefully chosen, poetic and shorthand, not ever saying more than what needs to be said. They’re a few escaped thoughts instead of a conversation. At the end of “Sea,” vocalist Stephen Immerwahr draws out the phonetics of the word “understand” for 23 seconds, emphasizing the prolonged feeling of giving up/in to depressive thoughts. This narrative of self-surrender is strung throughout
The White Birch and highlighted in Vacancy: “
What does the word vacancy mean, when you don’t expect anything.”
The White Birch is a relentless rumination. Like depression, it reflects boredom and complacency, but it also shines light on the shared human nature of it all. With the last few words of the closing track, Codeine finally send the tiniest signal of change and hopefulness:
“
Spent afternoons
In the smoking room
The things that I said then
Still make me burn with shame
The world is frozen now
It glitters, sparkles, and shines”
