Codeine - Pickup Song (Glitterhouse)

While many New York bands entered the '90s at breakneck speed, there was an anomaly among them in Codeine. The slowcore scene was invented around this great lumbering beast, and listening to them now, it's still difficult to see who, if anyone, has surpassed them. Bands such as Idaho and Low are fine, but no one could make quiet music as loudly as Codeine. "Pickup Song" begins with some gently plucked guitar and the droney monotone of singer Stephen Immerwahr. Then it arrives. "It" is the woozy sweep of heavily tremeloed guitar that brusquely enters and exits the song throughout its tantalizingly short lifespan. Sounding like it was swiped straight from Kevin Shields' fingertips, and turned right up so it swamps the song whenever it enters the mix, you can almost picture the sheer delight on the faces of the band members when they suddenly had this glorious woosh of noise to add to their armory. But this is Codeine, a band for whom restraint is everything, and, as such, they probably just shrugged their shoulders and bottled up this wondrous new sound, only uncorking it with trademark discretion. In Gus Van Sant's 2002 feature Gerry, Casey Affleck and Matt Damon's characters head off into the desert, looking for an undefinable "thing" that the audience is never privy to. I like to imagine the great arc of guitar that pummels "Pickup Song" to its knees is such a "thing," and when Immerwahr dolefully murmers "Wish I'd never seen your face" he's directly addressing his own creation, starring into a creative graveyard as the realization dawns on him that these things only come along once or twice in anyone's lifetime.

Unsane - Concrete Bed (Glitterhouse)

In the early '90s, just before Manhattan's Lower East Side completely caved in to the baying crowds of post-college kids, who lined up to throw their trust funds straight into the sweaty palms of morally repugnant landlords, a few bands emitted one last glorious howl from the scene. The days of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, DNA, and Mars were long over, Sonic Youth were sidling up to the majors, and Giuliani’s widespread clean up of the city was to begin in a few short years. The bands who were left, such as Cop Shoot Cop, the Action Swingers, STP, and Unsane, all made records that sounded like they were on the run from the gathering forces who were rapidly ushering them out of the neighborhood. “Concrete Bed,” Unsane’s 1990 single for German label Glitterhouse, perfectly embodies the fading scuzz of the Lower East Side. The de rigeur (for the time) buried vocals of the band's singer/guitarist Chris Spencer are barely decipherable (apart from the telling refrain: “it wasn’t always this way”), the late Charlie Ondras pounds away behind him, and the wonderfully muddy recording was cut on tape at Wharton Tiers’s legendary Fun City studio. The whole track sounds like it was written and recorded in about five minutes, and it probably was.