Red House Painters - On the Hill of the Red House

Red House Painters formed in San Francisco in the late '80s out of the meeting between singer Mark Kozelek, already the leader of God Forbid, and guitarist Gorden Mack. Hastily pigeonholed as a slo-core/sadcore band, Red House Painters can actually draw on a far more varied sound, one that takes in the atmospheric expanses of dream-pop via Cowboy Junkies and the nerve-wracking slowness of Codeine, with an intimate approach whose direct reference point is American Music Club. These influences come together in a rarefied, deeply depressive-mooded folk-rock, predominantly acoustic but with significant electric streaks (especially in their later period).

Red House Painters are the expressive vehicle of Mark Kozelek, a complex personality, musically introverted like Nick Drake, inwardly tormented like Kurt Cobain. A former drug addict, Kozelek is the classic example of an artist who turns to music as a means of exorcising his inner demons; an exceptional poet and one of the most emotional singers around, he has managed to build a universe made up of largely autobiographical stories, steeped in feeling and sentimentality, populated by losers and lovers in agony.

The fascination of the Painters' music lies in Kozelek's ability to narrate the "darkness" of the soul, human despair, the inevitable cruelty that fate reserves for the dispossessed, in an epic way, with sudden vocal surges grafted onto an otherwise constantly listless delivery, devoid of even the slightest inflection capable of expressing anger, resentment or passion. The Painters' music allows no redemption; once you've hit rock bottom, climbing back up isn't always possible. It is the music of utter resignation.

Praised by Mark Eitzel, Red House Painters release Down Colorful Hill on 4AD (and who else could it have been?). It's only six tracks, but rarely has music sounded this depressed. The atmospheres are as dreamlike as those of Mazzy Star and Galaxie 500, but in truth these are less dreams than nightmares, containing the existential dramas and self-pitying deliriums spawned by Kozelek's tortured mind. The arrangements, pared down to a bare minimum, are entirely in service of the vocal, consisting of a system of arpeggios and chords that interlock and follow one another, gently cradling Kozelek's indolent singing. The exasperatingly slow pace of "24" is marked out by a martial bassline over which mournful guitars coil around each other without ever exploding. "Medicine Bottle" is the psychodrama of a tormented love: “You’re building a wall/ higher than the both of us/ So try living life instead of hiding in the bedroom/ Show me a smile and I’ll promise not to leave you”. "Medicine Bottle" is also the track where you can catch hints of '80s new wave (traces of which subtly pervade the other compositions too); the melodic interplay of guitars and rising-and-falling basslines can't help but recall the sounds of Disintegration-era Cure. "Michael" is the moving epitaph for a "lost" friend: “Michael, where are you?/ Smile at my excitment the last time you called/ I slipped away to ask you from whereabouts/ I got a lead from your old triple-ex-girlfriend/ She said I heard he lost his mind again/ I said I didn’t know that you ever did”. Here Kozelek's singing becomes less detached, shifting into a higher register to express despair rather than resignation. "Lord Kill The Pain" is the most musically driven, played-in track on the record, a sparkling folk-rock number that resurrects the Flying Burrito Brothers with a Lou Reed on vocals.

A masterpiece of universal sorrow and human resignation set to music, Down Colorful Hill will go down in rock history as an unsurpassed testimony to the futility of life in the face of an inescapably cruel fate.

The self-titled Red House Painters pulls off the miracle of matching the expressive and qualitative heights of the debut. The cover, depicting an abandoned carousel, doesn't bode well, and indeed the mood remains exactly the same.

The sound shifts slightly, becoming noticeably more electric, and a Kozelek more aware of his own abilities stops murmuring and starts actually singing. The radiant "Grace Cathedral Park" hints at a light at the end of the tunnel, but it's only an illusion. With "Katy Song" we plunge back into the abyss, accompanied by a gentle melody that nonetheless afflicts beyond what's humanly bearable, evoking the sense of time passing and burning away everything around it. Music capable of unlocking those "moment bienheureux" but also the ensuing torment Proust wrote about. The electric, epic "Mistress" almost clashes with what the Painters had done up to that point, but it's a masterpiece of emotion (the piano version is also excellent). The Painters' sound is in perpetual fade, as "Rollercoaster" demonstrates, seeming to need to end before it's even begun. On the understated "Take Me Out", just voice and acoustic guitar, Kozelek takes on the role of a sad yet composed minstrel, in the manner of Nick Drake. The album closes with "Strawberry Hill", another peak of Kozelek's art, epic and sad, screamed and distorted, celestial and earthly all at once. Another masterpiece, and perhaps the album where Red House Painters best conveys the group's philosophy: their music doesn't express the rage of a generation desperately searching for its own identity, but rather the intimate awareness of the impossibility of overturning one's fate; the drama of someone whose future is already behind them, sinking into the abyss and struggling not to lose the one value they have left: dignity.

Leftovers and outtakes from the first two records are gathered on an album called Red House Painters (II), which contains the excellent "Evil" and "Uncle Joe".

On Ocean Beach, Kozelek pays closer attention to the arrangements, resulting in a fuller, less atmospheric sound, while the melodies remain as crystalline as ever. It's the Painters' most properly folk album (in the sense of Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel), with many tracks that could simply be played on an acoustic guitar. Kozelek finally sings with real passion, almost entirely abandoning the whispered style of his early days. He also seems animated by a new awareness, expressed in brighter tracks like the instrumental "Cabezon" and "Over My Head". Even the despair feels less acute, often giving way to gentler, less destructive feelings like melancholy; a case in point is "Summer Dress", pure poetry framed by a sublime string arrangement, a blurred snapshot of loneliness and the passing of time: “Summer dress separates you from the rest/ Easiest days of her life have been spent/ Wonders if she is loved, if she is missed/ Says a prayer as she’s kissed by ocean mist/ Takes herself to the sand and dreams”. Kozelek, voice and piano, paints a moving "Shadows" — where melancholy and lines of the deepest sadness still reign supreme: “The coarse and white colored skin/ It blends with the state you’re in/ And the wetness of your eyes/ Against a sun that clouds blind/ You ain’t saying nothing that I don’t already know/ When you say love’s dimming light won’t shine on tomorrow”. On this album, Kozelek's characters seem to have processed their pain, their suffering, their resignation. They're heading down the home stretch, aware that they've been defeated, and in a state of rapturous melancholy they reflect on why fate reserved for them an existence in perpetual decay. Poetic, melodic in just the right measure, emotional without being maudlin, Ocean Beach is the compendium of the Painters' music, the ideal starting point for anyone wanting to venture into Kozelek's tormented world.

Friction with 4AD leads the band (by now essentially a "one man band") to sign with Supreme, through whom they release their fourth effort, Songs For A Blue Guitar. Having fully abandoned the atmospheric sound of the first two albums, Kozelek presents himself as a humble folksinger. If the sound loses some originality in the process, it gains in rhythm and musicality. Kozelek finally writes fully-formed songs, no longer nebulous clusters of repeated chords. Eclectic and varied, Songs For A Blue Guitar shows greater artistic ambition; Kozelek begins leafing through the encyclopedia of rock, paying tribute, directly or indirectly, to his idols through a series of covers. It's a pleasure to hear "Long Distance Runaround" (Yes), "All Mixed Up" (Cars), "Silly Love Songs" (Paul McCartney) in the Painters' shadowy rendition. Tiptoeing along, as Drake taught, Kozelek delivers a melancholy "Have You Forgotten", followed by "Song For A Blue Guitar" (more Dylan than Donovan), a hymn to loneliness and regret: “When everything we felt failed/ And some music soft in distant sails/ But it don’t sound like it did before/ Then I know I’m left with nothing more than my own soul…/ In a room all I feel is the cold that you left/ Through the air all I see is your face full of blame”. This track brings out that bitter feeling of running into an old love and finding them ravaged by time. There's naturally a tribute to the supreme philosopher of depression, Neil Young, taking shape in the sturdy country blues of "Make Like Paper": twelve minutes and three seconds of pure guitar neurosis. A notch below the previous two masterpieces, Songs For A Blue Guitar is a useful manual on the craft of the depressed folksinger.

It's hard to match the quality peaks of the first two masterpieces, but even so the Painters keep producing excellent albums — Old Ramon is no exception. Problems with Island/Supreme delay its release by a few years, until it finally comes out in 2001 on Sub Pop. It's their most musical album, as the gutsy "Between Days" proves, and also their least sad, judging by the poppy "Byrd Joel". Still, the usual highly depressive numbers aren't missing, like "Cruiser", "Michigan" and "Golden", also inspired by the death of John Denver. Kozelek seems to have finally exorcised the ghosts that haunted him, moving toward a new maturity that sees him become more musician and less poet/storyteller of failure.

The music of Red House Painters is a sociological essay on resignation, on that state of profound prostration that sets in once emotional collapse has already occurred, leaving the individual projected into an existential dimension that is the antechamber of suicide.

Two years after the release of Old Ramon, Kozelek will form Sun Kil Moon with Koutsos, refining his songwriting craft. Guitarist Phil Carney will join pianist Chris Connolly in Desertshore, a band poised between slowcore and neoclassical echoes; bassist Jerry Vessel, meanwhile, will go solo under the moniker Heirlooms Of August.

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