Red House Painters were fairly popular in the early '90s, but details on them were scarce. This was all before the Internet, so you basically had what a jewel box told you. It's hard to imagine at this point, but when I first heard them, I didn't know anything about Mark Kozelek, the frontman and mastermind behind the project. I'm not sure I knew his name, and I definitely didn't know what he looked like, or his personality outside of the songs. I also had no idea the band was a quartet, or that they lived in San Francisco (in Kozelek's case, via Ohio). At least for me, Red House Painters existed outside of a scene, too. They had a familiar record label with its own distinct aesthetic, but that was the only real touchstone.
Not that any of this is bad. The songs on the first four albums—1992's Down Colorful Hill, 1993's pair of self-titled albums (the first nicknamed Rollercoaster, the second Bridge, after the photographs on their covers), and 1995's Ocean Beach (here packaged with the Shock Me EP from a year earlier)—felt personal and private enough that it was easy to get lost in your own head while listening. They featured heartbreaking, personal lyrics and were accompanied by stark, often naturalistic photographs on the covers. The package came with the crystalline, spacious production and Kozelek's clear, powerful voice, and these things merged in an almost mystical way. The material felt less composed or worked over; it was more like the songs were birthed fully formed. They could drift on for more than 10 minutes, but you kind of gave up on keeping track of this kind of thing.
When old albums get reissued, which they increasingly do, the practice usually offers a chance to hear familiar songs again, sometimes with remastering, maybe a few bonuses. Some listeners are feeling nostalgic, seeking to recreate the original context in their minds, while many others are learning about the material for the first time, and aren't all that clear on the context beyond the updated liner notes. 4AD's decision to reissue Red House Painters' first four albums as a fairly spare limited-edition Record Store Day box set (on bronze vinyl, with individual album reissues on black vinyl to follow) offers a unique angle: The band's cantankerous frontman (as we can now call him after that whole War on Drugs debacle) is much better known, and known quite differently, all these years later. Now you do know exactly who Mark Kozelek is, or at least you think you do.
It's important to remember, though, that the group wasn't just Kozelek. At least not at the beginning. For the first three full-lengths, it was Kozelek on vocals and guitars along with drummer Anthony Koutsos, bassist Jerry Vessel, and guitarist Gorden Mack. (Koutsos and Vessel continued with Kozelek to 2001; Mack left in 1995 and was replaced by Phil Carney, who still plays with Sun Kil Moon now and then.) Starting with Songs for a Blue Guitar, which followed Red House Painters' last album for 4AD Ocean Beach, Kozelek basically started doing everything on his own. He released it on Supreme Recordings, a label owned by John Hughes and under the auspices of Island Records, which reminds me that he's the only person from Red House Painters who also went on to act in movies.
Even accounting for the added years and maybe some Kozelek burnout, the four LPs in this boxset remain Red House Painters' most magical records, and some of the most beautiful works of Kozelek's career. If you're someone who's been put off by his feuds and outbursts, put aside those reservations—these records deserve it. And, really, when you come back to them, even after all these years, that mystery somehow still remains. In fact, now and then I need to remind myself just who it is I'm listening to. Unlike later SKM, the vocals are treated with airier effects. The production is deep and spacious, and sounds very 4AD. Kozelek's lyrics are personal, and moving, but come cloaked in ellipses and metaphor rather than the tell-all logorrhea of Benji.
The first song we heard from Red House Painters is "24", the magisterial slowcore opener on 1992's Down Colorful Hill. It's from the point of view of someone, aged 24, worrying about growing old: "Oldness comes to rile/ The youth who dream suicide." This is a concern across all of Kozelek's work, and it's easy to imagine him worrying about these same things when he was 9 going on 10.
The start of "24" is nearly silent—gentle minimal guitar before drums come in; it almost sounds like the start of a Codeine track. These songs were demos, and are lightly touched up for the proper 4AD debut, but still sound spare and homemade and thin in the best way (a way that works with the confessional tone of the material). Red House Painters are more of a definable rock band on Colorful, though, with fuzzed guitars, martial drumming, and more basic structures; on the slinky post-rock of "Japanese to English", you can imagine them in a practice space, jamming it out. In this sense, it's less otherworldly than the next two albums.
On the anguished second track, "Medicine Bottle", he offers up some of the detail-rich run-on lyricism that he returns to later with SKM. There's a playful country western-tinged sendup "Lord Kill the Pain", which takes Kozelek's depressing lyrics to a comical extreme with lines like: "Kill my neighbors/ And all my family too/ They doubt my direction." Of course, he's likely partially serious, too. This humor is something Kozelek has maintained, even when his critics think of him as being peevish or over-sensitive.
There's the nostalgic, quietly heartbreaking "Michael", a song about someone wondering whatever happened to their best friend from years earlier with both funny ("Do you remember our first subway ride?/ Our first heavy metal haircuts?") and moving ("I remember your smile in the sun/ The day-dreaming boy without your shirt on…") details. It ends with Kozelek noting that the connection is still there: "You're the oldest juvenile delinquent bum/ My best friend."
It's the gorgeous title track that hints most at the truly brilliant second collection, Rollercoaster. It's nimble. It feels effortless. It expands to 11 minutes without seeming to push very hard. It barely matters what he's saying because of how it's paced and how it's said. On Rollercoaster*,* it felt like RHP existed outside of everything, and listening now, it still feels that way. Down Colorful Hill is an excellent, idiosyncratic debut, but it doesn't quite prepare you for the 1993 collection. Mark Kozelek produced Rollercoaster, and it's proof enough that he's the best person to be handling the knobs on his own songs: the guitar sound is perfect, songs burst and bloom, the vocals are placed perfectly like ghosts. Overall, Rollercoaster and Bridge, released the same year and featuring songs from the same session, move away from the more songwriterly approach of the other work in Kozelek's career—the production is more distant and expansive, and the instruments are given to lengthy excursions and big blasts of guitars.
There are technically 14 songs on Rollercoaster, but it's not the kind of album where you stop to note these kinds of distinctions: Each song feels like a detail in a large painting. On it, Kozelek fears the violence in his blood, remembers being an outcast, worries about getting older and losing meaning and connections ("Scares me how you get older/ How you forget about each other"), dismisses a girl in New Jersey, acts like a romantic asshole ("I still feel the sting in my hand/ From when I hit you/ I keep your picture tidy and safe in a shrine"), confesses that he's afraid to drive, and manages to do all this in moving, atmospheric anthems that resonate two decades later. The songs tend to go on forever, and it seems like Kozelek assumes if he stops, his subject might disappear.
He returns again and again to the idea of forgetting, and he doesn't leave out the details that could make him look bad: "I've had enough of the/ Brutal beatings and name callings/ To lose me to this bed/ Bruised internally, eternally." You get warts and all, even in songs that feel like they could be sonnets. He wonders a lot where people are. The 13-minute "Mother" is filled with the sort of raging fear of loss that we hear later on "I Can't Live Without My Mother's Love". The album also features "Katy Song", a classic Kozelek eight-and-a-half-minute paean to not being enough. If you ever need to cry on command, I recommend taking a listen. Rollercoaster closes with the brief, compact "Brown Eyes", a two-minute acoustic jangle of a song that suggests where he goes on Ocean Beach and onward (and, itself, ends with a lovely 40 seconds of quietly expansive drums and dainty guitars).
Rollercoaster was followed by Bridge in October of 1993; it featured songs from the same recording session as Rollercoaster, and on paper looks like an odds and sods—its eight songs include a cover of Simon & Garfunkel's "I Am a Rock", a feedbacking rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner", and a more electrified, revved-up take on Rollercoaster's "New Jersey". But Kozelek is a master of covers, and makes the songs his own; plus, there are more than enough originals here to balance it out.
The standouts here are the songs that sound most like they'd fit on Rollercoaster, the pastoral "Bubble" and the dark, strummed "Uncle Joe", which starts with the line "where have all the people gone in my life?" and finds him in pain after late-night television is over. (I've seen kids on lyric "meaning" sites likening "Bubble" to Internet dating because of lines like "I embrace the moment, I'm in love with a dream/ And toy with ideas that burn deep inside me/ Cause a picture is all you are to me/ A picture is all you'll ever be.")
Throughout, the tone is eerier and somehow more quietly violent than Rollercoaster. This comes to a head on the eight-minute "Blindfold" that moves through lyrics like "What possessed you not to include me?/ How have you failed to invite me/ How could you laugh with her in that theater?/ When you're off and I'm alone?" and ends with Kozelek howling his best grunge (nay, metal) howl, raging louder than the drums or clashing guitars around him.
The final album on the box, and his last for 4AD, is 1995's Ocean Beach. It opens with a sunny, lilting instrumental called "Cabezon", three breezy minutes of pleasant music. The album, in general, seems to be Kozelek's California record, and stands out from what came before it.
The first proper song, "Summer Dress", is in the more usual downcast Red House Painters' mode, but the songs are folkier and less amorphous; overall, this is the one RHP offering you could compare to Toad the Wet Sprocket and be basically right. The hooks are immediate, the sequencing rock-album complete: The wistful "Summer Dress" transitions to the gently fuzzed rock of "San Geronimo" which moves into the piano-led ballad, "Shadows". You get almost hippie-like noodles on the steel-guitars of "Over My Head" (before which we get studio chatter that jokingly mentions "new age windchimes") and an echo of past melancholia with "Red Carpet". It's a stately, well-composed collection, and it's beautiful. The use of feedback is delicate (even on the more searing close of "Moments", which is reminiscent of the way Yo La Tengo use feedback).
It closes with the 13-minute "Drop", one of Kozelek's best heartsick pieces: "I'd like to come home to see you/ And to catch your sickness by the bedside/ But then you'd know how much I really need you." With him it's never easy, of course, and he adds: "But then my hate for you/ Makes my feelings altogether drop." It's a masterful closer, and an example of how Kozelek can draw you into his world and make you forget time's passage, even as he obsesses over it.
For this box, its sister is the four-song Shock Me EP. "Shock Me" is a Kiss cover, though you wouldn't know it unless you'd memorized the 1977 original. You get it here in both its four-minute "electric" and 11-minute acoustic version, along with two very good, shorter songs, "Sundays and Holidays" and "Three-Legged Cat". It's great to have it in the box, though sonically, it would've made more sense to pair it with either Rollercoaser or Bridge.
Listening closely to these records now shines a light on the rest of Kozelek's career. It's the most you can hope for as far as reissues go, and it really does feel like a skeleton key returning to these albums you thought you knew so well. You think of these songs, with their fear of growing old and dying, and put them in context with all the songs from his youth he and his band have covered (by artists like AC/DC, Kiss, Simon & Garfunkel, John Denver, Paul McCartney), and where he's ended up now, singing about being old, and you realize that time itself was always the preoccupation here, as well as the inevitability of death, even in your happiest moments. And you realize, listening, that you got older, too.
