Red House Painters

Perhaps the secret of sadness lies in simplicity. Certainly the beauty of a secret lies in its exclusivity, in its power to make us feel important, custodians of a magic formula that tricks us into believing we're unique. So, opening our treasure chest — maybe a drawer that creaks with happiness every time it's made to play — we can grasp things we feel are ours, even if they weren't made for us.

That's the beauty of music. It finds its own way to us. And so we find ourselves holding precious objects like this record, bare and essential right down to its liner notes. Yes, the cover. That bed with its delicate embroidery seems made on purpose to host the saddest thoughts a man could ever produce. Lying down, eyes fixed on a sky of plaster and concrete, we're ready to let our secret play: a silver disc holding just six songs. Sorry, six songs. That's it. It's our habit of far more crowded tracklists that makes us think of six songs as "few". Are we really so sure they're not perfect, though? In this case, they certainly are.

The most fascinating element of this record is its innate sense of proportion. Nothing could have been left out, nothing could have been added. Everything sounds perfect, calibrated, achieving an incredible feat: stretching a song out over many minutes without ever wearing out its welcome. Yet the arrangements are utterly bare-bones, the instrumentation stripped to the essentials, and it's this sense of desolation that makes all the difference.

"Down Colorful Hill" never bores because it manages to forge such deep empathy with the listener that it induces an almost cathartic state, in which everything around them matters little or feels distant. And that is nothing other than the feeling of sadness itself. The work of Mark Kozelek is perhaps the saddest ever released in music. Sadness here is not anguish, not despair. No. It's a far subtler, more invisible form of apathy, a sweetly dangerous, anesthetizing cradle. You find yourself observing the world as a spectator, almost as if watching a film; everything becomes cyclical, repetitive, and the meaning of things shifts, turns upside down. You can't rebel against sadness, because it has no reason to justify itself.

So you listen to the lazy guitar murmurs that open "24" and they feel like the ideal soundtrack to your own stillness. A drowsy trickle of shimmering notes, a faint drum hit, a lazy toll of bass, and then Kozelek's voice arrives, gorgeous, taking hold of the scene, laden with an echo like the one that spreads through an empty room. An effect perhaps intended to heighten the sense of loneliness even further. A listless rhythm starts to mark time, guitar and bass conversing beautifully, sliding away into simple, delicate weaves. The first masterpiece.

Four drumstick clicks and we're plunged into the second masterpiece, the following "Medicine Bottle". The connecting thread is a hypnotic guitar lament, but what makes the difference is the "sound". The wonderful sound of the drums, with their dry, precise snare, the perfect rim shots, Kozelek's melodic, seductive voice, the dark, metaphysical bass, the classical guitar that accompanies the chorus almost furtively. A track running over nine minutes that never grows tiresome, and that instead makes you want to hear it again every time. One of the finest songs of the Nineties.

The title track, though it hardly deserves such a grand title, is a delightful elegiac little march, of an almost religious intensity. Kozelek's invocations now resemble the prayer of a desperate man, the last plea of a man condemned to death. This is without doubt the most moving track of all, of a disconcerting tenderness, with the guitar weeping liquid notes and the drums relentlessly marking the martial step.

Melancholy immediately takes center stage again in "Japanese To English", with the usual minimal guitar underpinnings. What's new here is the sense of hope glimpsed in the middle section, which opens into a beautiful twilight gallop of languid guitar and bass interplay, before folding back into the record's usual solitary moods. The track is more complex than those before it, and hides its ambitions even better, making it all the more rewarding to rediscover over time.

A sudden burst of sunlight comes courtesy of the bright, even easygoing folk-rock of "Lord Kill The Pain", with its irresistible rhythm that catches off guard a listener by now fully accustomed to the record's spirals of melancholy. But this is no bad thing — quite the opposite, the clear skies arrive at just the right moment, granting a pause of joy and lightheartedness.

The curtain falls on another peak of emotion. “Michael” is in fact dedicated by Kozelek to a dear friend of his who passed away. You can hear in the tone of his voice that the involvement has deepened, the vocals are now far more heartfelt, and, as ever, the beauty of simplicity is found in just a few words: “Michael, where are you?... Do you remember?”, the inability to describe a person any better than with a “my best friend”, the final line that consigns the record to history.

Don't be fooled by the sparseness of the arrangements, by the austere taste for melody. “Down Colorful Hill” demands attention and patience before it can be fully absorbed. Then again, this “camouflage-like” quality is precisely one of the strengths that defines it. Once absorbed, it will repay the time invested, and will naturally demand more of it every time you want to listen to great music.

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06/11/2006