Categories
ESSENTIAL NEW MUSIC RECORD REVIEWS

Essential New Music: Red House Painters’ “Red House Painters”

RHP

“So much that I can’t say to you,” Mark Kozelek croons on “Drop,” a raw, ethereal epic toward the end of the Red House Painters’ peerless 1995 emotional leveler Ocean Beach. “My voice shakes from the hurt that I hide.” Of course, by this point in Kozelek’s career, it was actually very fucking difficult to believe that the sanguinary troubadour hid even a single bloody tear from his growing coterie of acolytes. (“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” does not exactly scream holding back.)

Those who missed the glorious downward spiral the first time around can now catch up with the black cloud via 4AD’s gorgeous LP boxed-set reissue of the band’s long-out-of-print first four records—a three-year drone-to-folk journey full of beauty and brood unmatched before or since.

—Shawn Macomber