Soundrot Presents: Slowcore
D for effort
D for intent
D because you pay the rent
A week ago I promised to write this article, two days out from when it is due I have almost nothing done. After work, hours float away as Youtube videos I’ve seen before pass through focus and into oblivion. With each of these articles and the recent videos, a sense of completion is missing, a leering accumulation of trifled time, accented by the lulls in creativity likewise in activity. There’s a duality to the obligations I take up, they hold both priority and distraction, a sense that I could be doing something else of greater or equal importance. In the clash of the two I end up doing neither. I’ve picked this up again Sunday, almost four days after it was supposed to be done. The playlist isn’t made, and I can’t account for the week.
D for dishes
F for floors
Can't make the grade anymore
I don’t think I’ve lived long enough to know what regret is. Bromide about regret like living life in avoidance of it, or living to not die with it point to the cumulative, a cloud of it built up over time. I’m turning twenty four this month.Time seems to catch up with you instead of go through you; memories resurge, the worst of them dredging up more intense feelings than the good, recoloring every one in relation to them. I may not have lived long enough to know regret, but I fear its possibility, one that at times appears to border on certainty--a lifetime of minor mistakes that dies down into a montage of what if. Fear of failure, of regret, is a quotidian filter and your every action falls within its haze. I may not have lived long enough to know regret, but at my worst I think I set myself up for it.
You know the harder you try
To be
Its not to difficult to see
Why you are
not happy
Slowcore lives in this feeling. From Imarwhar’s wilted getting-by whispers on D, to the fading aspirations of 24, and More Than Ever’s gut-tightening realization of how it could have been done. It’s a genre that aims towards capturing time catching up to you, the little mistakes, chasing of dead ends and empty projects, and years of lassitude that come together in a realization of age and lack of fulfillment. The flip side of rock, strings of failed relationships, half-hearted attempts at self-improvement: the faded end of a skid mark, the best left behind in a big black streak with nothing ahead. Pure inversion, every bombastic, swaggering riff stretched out and slowed down to glacial pace, any high closer to a cry of an abyssal epiphany than a triumphant whoop or solo—notes ring out and hover instead of flying by in testosterone fury.
And more than ever I know that's not true
Are there any good things left to do?
Are there any right ways left to be?
That's not a question best left to
me
Never bigger than five bands to all but retrospectives and crate digging, despite its size slowcore managed to capture something so essential about its era, and in that feeling a more timeless kernel of emotion. Where Kurt Cobain and the subsequent fallout of grunge was offered up as the voice of a generation—even though lyrical content and overall vibe eschewed any address of the burnt out and left-feeling-lied-to sentiments of the ‘90s—slowcore seems to strike a more genuine nerve in breathing to life the essential anxiety of Gen X, its professed aimlessness and sensation that the lifestyle and routes to it prescribed were outmoded.
Slowcore above all is an honest testament to the possibility that life doesn’t turn out the way you want it to. That the moments you want never arrive: it all might be one long string of unfulfilled aspirations, where life just finds more complicated ways to disappoint and strip parts of you away.