The New Year
Snow

Everyone has realized by now that today the laws of the market let nothing rest in peace. Every x years, a Cobain box set is released, as precise as a vaccine, and whoever buys it is always an idiot. Every lustrous era, a random genre is sieved by the media/influencers, dressed for a party, and made to dance around a bit. Various artists, if lucky, are occasionally "rediscovered" by Pitchfork/whoever, and always at the right moment, that is when the wind has already been favorable for a few months (never before, "criticism" my foot). If '70s groups fell into the '80s trap, trying to stay afloat in an already alien market, today's groups have the reverse problem: they are encouraged to return by fashion and thus to write again, with clearly varied results. There's always a bit of fear, and no one can figure out if we're happy or not that groups like American Football or At the Drive-In re-enter the studio. There are even bands back in the saddle thanks to the presence of their songs in trending TV series.

However, there are certain currents that the market cannot swallow and dress up. And I'm not talking about experimental electronic or noise, genres so mainstream that it's laughable to consider them outsiders or "counter" today. I'm bringing up things like slowcore, a musical style never back in vogue, never noticed, never considered cool. Sure, 4-5-6 years ago they too had some reunions, riding the wave of Low's resilience, but the bands were all so disillusioned that real comebacks were zero. Let's make an appeal, shall we? Codeine: disbanded. Carissa’s Wierd: disbanded, some nice project with less than 50 followers on SoundCloud by one member, another founded Band of Horses (bleh). Kozelek no longer has anything slowcore and is about to become a meme. Lost. Low, after their last-ditch effort 6 years ago, have regressed to insipid indie and are no longer fashionable. Idaho has been silent since 2011 and gets less than a hundred views on YT. Even the "new" generation (Barzin at the top) hasn't lifted their heads in years. There are still the Spain, I guess, even if they're almost Americana by now.

Once upon a time, there were the Bedhead, a great band, associated with Slint, etc. Their '94 album is a fine example of making soft loud music. College rock filtered through a post sieve. In 1998 they're no more; the founders, the Kadane brothers, then form The New Year. A peculiar feature: it’s a correspondence band. One brother lives in Dallas, the other in Boston. The bassist is from NY. The drummer, believe it or not, is Brokaw from Codeine (also Boston). The band's musical ideas travel by mail across the states, coagulating very slowly into refined and wonderfully arranged artifacts, left to decant years before airing. A New Year album, in fact, comes out with the same frequency as cicada broods: the previous album to this is 9 years ago, practically like Tool. Nonexistent dates, as you can imagine: it's already something if a slowcore heart beats in the world, even if with the frequency of a sea lion in hibernation on Ganymede.

Let's talk about the album, then. The Kadane coordinates remain stubbornly fixed, aimed at the hermetic search for the perfect slowcore track. Even the timbre survives unscathed over the years, at most a seasoned prudence is discerned in juxtaposing, a scientific millimeter more or less on a pedal, a Callimachean game, for the few. Not that the music is difficult, slowcore never is: it's sad, disrespectful music. Sometimes sloppy, but definitely not here: the tracks bloom with dull and muted colors, though certainly with more zest compared to Bedhead, for instance. Myths shows what I mean: the track’s insane beauty relies on a crescendo devoid of anything post-rock, a crescendo that is simply a masterpiece of arrangement, timbre, and atmosphere. The voice, calm and resigned, is almost unnecessary. What's important are the drool-inducing backs, the Rhodes that peek out for a melancholic caress, a "Codeine-like" rimshot that brings to everything the specific characteristic of the genre: sad energy: a kind of oxymoron, the dark matter of rock, radically different from post-punk or singer-songwriter. The entire album is permeated by an urban aura that betrays the captive genesis of the album: it’s like observing an endangered species that doesn’t have enough genetic diversity to solidly increase its population, but has a lifespan so long it can't disappear except after many years of solitude and melancholy.

As if stuck in limbo, the Kadanes hold high a banner no one is interested in following.