Five Easy Masterpieces: introductory albums to slowcore
By the time we dipped our toes into the 1990s, rock music had evolved to the point of wild genre propagation. Throughout the 1970s, glam-rock and prog-rock bled into obscurity as the heavier twins, metal and punk, took flight. Throughout the 1980s, synth-pop may have dominated the charts. Still, guitar-based bands of the post-punk wave continued to develop rock music, refining ancestral genres with modern production techniques and stylistic preferences. The wonderful subgenre known as slowcore fell from this crossbreeding mass in the late 1980s and blossomed through the 1990s.
While it’s safe to say that Miles Davis was a jazz musician and that Muddy Waters was fond of the blues, the niche subgenres of the 1990s are somewhat ill-defined. Slowcore is characterised by suppressed tempos, downcast lyrical delivery and soft guitar work that often builds towards intense, atmospheric crescendos. Naturally, there are several bands that blur the line between slowcore and its closest neighbours on the musical map, such as shoegaze and dream-pop.
Consequently, there’s no hard and fast rule to determining whether a given band is slowcore, and, indeed, many will be tagged by several subgenres. However, it is generally understood that the style emerged in the late 1980s as a subdued alternative to the concurrent work of artists like Pixies and Nirvana.
Galaxie 500 were certainly progenitors of slowcore but aren’t usually considered archetypal; otherwise, I might have included their 1988 masterpiece Today in this list. Instead, I hope to introduce newcomers to the wonders of slowcore by exploring the five albums I deem superlative examples and unavoidable masterworks of the genre. Of course, these selections take a tiny, if potent, sample from the ocean of slowcore material out there waiting to be discovered both within and outside these artists’ oeuvres.
Five slowcore masterpieces:
Bedhead – WhatFunLifeWas (1994)
At the second logical stop on our tour of slowcore masterpieces, we alight in Dallas, Texas, where the crucial genre proponent Bedhead emerged in 1991. Running a couple of years behind Codeine, they released their debut album WhatFunLifeWas in 1994, which also endured as the band’s essential masterpiece and an example of slowcore at its best.
Similar to Codeine, the group was influenced strongly by artists on the darker side of punk’s evolutionary trail, with bands like Joy Division, Spacemen 3 and The Velvet Underground central to their musical background. While Codeine’s associative sound is more comparable to noise-rock and shoegaze, Bedhead is remembered for jazz-inspired rhythms and clearer, melodic guitar work. Distortion finally took a solid hold on their sound in the 1998 LP Transaction de Novo.
Codeine – Frigid Stars LP (1990)
It seems sensible to start with the quintessential product of the 1990s slowcore wave. Codeine emerged in the late 1980s as a sedated answer to the contemporary grunge movement with gentle vocal delivery and dynamic volume control. When someone asks me what slowcore is, I’ll invariably divert their attention to this early masterpiece released on the famous Sub Pop label.
Codeine hails from New York City, but their vast pool of influence bleeds into the Atlantic, with UK punk innovation at the heart of their nuanced style. This debut album takes “frigid stars” from a line written by Mark E. Smith, which appeared in The Fall’s 1979 song ‘Crap Rap 2’. Other more apparent influences on Codeine’s sound include The Cure and Joy Division. In 1994, Codeine recorded a cover of Joy Division’s ‘Atmosphere’ as their last release before disbandment. Since then, they returned for reunion tours in 2012 and 2023.
Duster – Stratosphere (1998)
In 1996, San Jose’s Duster entered the picture with a low-fi rock sound that drew inspiration from the slowcore scene that was well-established at this stage. A perfect example of the genre, the band’s associative sound centres on gentle chords that pulsate with the rhythm section with distant, muffled vocals invariably forecasting heavy weather.
Throughout their initial run between 1996 and 2001, Duster released two seminal albums, Stratosphere and Contemporary Movement. The former tends to surface as the band’s salient masterpiece as the emphatic debut and the home to such classics as ‘Inside Out’ and ‘Constellations’.
Low – I Could Live in Hope (1994)
Another essential band from the slowcore wave, Low, emerged from Duluth, Minnesota, the birthplace of Bob Dylan, in 1993. Dissimilar from Dylan’s folk-rock style, the founding duo, Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker, set out to revive the moody post-punk era under a distinctive light of slow tempos and tear-jerking lyricism.
Low remained active for nearly three decades, with the band calling it quits in 2022 following Parker’s tragic death. Throughout this period, the group remained markedly prolific, releasing 13 studio albums of various styles. While all of the albums held the dreamy, melancholia alt-rock thread central to their identity, the 1994 debut, I Could Live in Hope, is considered the masterpiece of their early catalogue and a central protagonist in the slowcore story.
Red House Painters – Red House Painters (Rollercoaster) (1993)
The final piece to the jigsaw puzzle at the heart of the slowcore movement is Red House Painters. Founding members Mark Kozelek and Anthony Koutsos formed the group in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1988 but struggled to find a label, prompting a wise move to San Francisco, where they recruited guitarist Gorden Mack and bassist Jerry Vessel and signed to 4AD.
Red House Painters remained active until 2001, releasing a total of six albums. Striking gold in the first LP seems to be a trend among these slowcore stalwarts, and Red House Painters certainly don’t buck it. Their 1993 eponymous debut, often named Rollercoaster, brings a folk-infused definition to the genre in a consistent collection of emotional ballads mostly written by Kozelek. London’s up-and-coming shoegaze band Cheerless shoes this classic album during their ‘Doctor’s Orders’ feature with us in 2023.
