Codeine
The White Birch

"These raindrops will make the puddles smile, the short space under my umbrella is what I have, on this gray morning, but I want to live it with you, until the storm arrives. The storm will take us away, will tear us away from this grayness and we can see the sea, the waves of the sea, the high water, and hide our face, our face, in the waves of the sea."

The neoclassical beauty blends with the minimalist aesthetic of this universal Poem: a marble female face hidden by centuries emerges from the underside of a slab of material eternity enclosed in the short breath of man's time, as long as man has time, scrutinized from below, enclosed in the frame of flowers and trees... and the silence of the cloister, of an island just off the coast, but not too much, just lapped by the calm waves, just kissed by the sun, and grazed by the long shadows...

Extra-contextualization re-contextualizable by those who will read (if they want) because the meaning of a work is monumentum and documentum in the archaeology of the soul, in the infinite river patterns that traverse our (brief and constrained) internal geographic time.

These reconnections perhaps will be useful to rebuild it, perhaps not. It doesn't matter.

The Codeine (Douglas Scharin, David Grubbs, John Engle) are an American trio, accustomed and capable, as can be heard, of infusing emotional, panoramic, environmental suggestions into the inseparable sonic weave that forms each of these simple, yet precious, songs. The music: a sparse rock, ethereal but substantial, well-structured in its subtly sophisticated and avant-garde compositional architecture, reduced to the essence of the guitar-bass-drums triangulation, with the simple but ingenious intuition of slowing down, theatricalizing its existential meaning, the rhythms that mark the image narratives that unfold like a rising sun, like a gust of wind blowing through the trees, or the view of the snow-capped peaks on the horizon. Impressionist poetry, since their dazzling debut, which encapsulated the enigmatic distance of the sidereal spaces: "Frigid Stars", and in particular the single "D" (editors: Sub Pop) perfectly illustrated the constructive technique and interpretative style of this fascinating group's rock-songs: electro-acoustic arpeggios resting on a slow, dilated, syncopated, and lingering drumming, until almost magically everything takes shape, the melody firmly emerges and harmonizes with the more electric, almost noise-like sound, and the power of the drums; the harmonic structure is circular and repetitive (as in the best indie tradition), the stylistic inspiration includes the strident and swirling electric guitars of Dinosaur Jr and the melody-noise contrasts of their Albion alter-egos JAMC, but there's more, a particular inspiration, an apparent simplicity yet extremely intricate, endowed with such perfection that it eclipses other possible references; one could say that Codeine is so "forward" that their ideas could be considered native, authentically new in a stylistic sense.

After the interlude with the mini-album "Barely Real" comes the second true follow-up: after the icy and distant starry sky of the debut, "The White Birch", "La Betulla Bianca". A suggestive, wintery title, emblematic of a crepuscular, minimalist, sometimes almost hermetic poetry that permeates these nine musical episodes.  "Sea" in fact establishes the line for the entire work: "a white ship sails on a black sea, takes my love away from me, and now I understand...". Chiaroscuro as in artistic photography, a white vessel on the black ocean, and a suspended, impenetrable ending. The subsequent "Loss Leader" is one of the album's best episodes: a minor melody, repeated twice, again the singing gently places itself like the "Five Leaves Left" on the sonic paved floor, then the melody explodes, the determined rhythm follows the saturated, prolonged electric solos, and the voice as well, partially dominates and is partially subdued (listen to "Creep" by Radiohead to understand... with no allusions to who-invented-what-before-whom)

"Tom", the lead single of this much-anticipated work, seems on one hand to encapsulate the most significant ideas (melodies that change like the pre-dawn light, impressionism in song form and narrative without contours, chiaroscuro nuances that surround everything almost to hide its profile), even if it seems a bit of a simplification, a condensed version of what the group wants to express, (besides the inevitable commercial implications), which ultimately makes it one of the less significant moments; fascinating instead are the dark "Wirh" and the delicate "Smoking Room", all, in essence, variations on the theme (real variations, not mere nuances of the same song) that offer each, as in impressionist painting, prolonged moments photographed with an open diaphragm, of different moments of the day, as well as the underlying representation of the inner meteorological variations of the emotions of those who lived, imagined, and transcribed those moments into music.

 An album recommendable to fans of genres for which it is suitable to "bridge the gap": Come, Slint, Red House Painters, Smog, Sophia, Mazzy Star, Blonde Redhead, Nick Drake, Mogwaii

 "Every time we listen it's one more scar. But it's one less wound".

(I dedicate this humble piece of writing to the Festival Delle Diverse Abilità)