Computer Age

Red House Painters
Red House Painters (I)
4AD 1993

Nothing makes you feel more miserable that loneliness, unrequited love that, nothing hurts as much as the vacuum after handing everything in a relationship that fails, we are just memories that were once blue but now wither after a thick veil ocher.
Despite that, people desperately seeking love, yearning to find anyone even knowing that everything will end some day and that will hurt more the more love invest.
It is difficult to draw something positive from these situations, most of us mortal lock in a bubble to expect the storm to pass, because it always ends up happening, but there are people capable of creating something really special from these situations, capable of deepening in pain until you find the beauty; did Nick Drake, the great master, and cost him his life.
A Mark Eitzel at the time nobody really took him seriously, his statements were taken as distressing delusions of strength, so no one expected someone to continue that troubled path until in 1989 came Red House Painters with his inexhaustible arsenal of bitterness under his arm .
It was precisely Eitzel (who if not) who first band was set at this strange, dull and slow, with roots in folk, rock and the country that gave his first concerts in San Francisco, a gang led by Mark Kozelek, a misogynist intractable nature with a cloudy past, certainly.
The band signed in 1992 by 4AD, and after a remarkable record a disc, where it already appeared clear their intentions ( "Down Colorful Hill"), was presented a year later in the record company with over twenty songs that would make up one of the discs most shocking of the story, an unnamed disc, the disc of the roller coaster.
Through 14 songs and nearly 80 minutes, Mark Kozelek-by in this record, one by one, all facets of emotional collapse in a truly shocking journey that begins with the beautiful Grace Cathedral Park, "a deceptively bright item of clothing intimate folk that leads to a series of lethal items, stark and distressing, in which there is no hope or consolation, and in which, despite everything, the beauty prevails. "Katy Song" is perhaps the great song of the album, a terrible reflection on loneliness, about jealousy, about the failure, the inability to love, a song that flows slowly under a shutdown and distant pace with stanzas full of bitterness and lethal Resentment: "I know tomorrow, you will be, somewhere in london, living with someone, you've got some kind of family there to turn to and that's more than i could ever give you."
The carousel is prolonged emotional issues as unfathomable sadness "Mistress," "Things mean a lot", "New Yersey" or dying "Take me out": "if only you could take me out, instead of back in, to i do not understand a relationship "in a bleak journey that few listeners can resist to the end.
The subjects of dismissed this record would appear months later collected in a mini lp, also unnamed (the record of the bridge), which complemented and increased the emotional chaos and disaster.
Mark Kozelek strove to leave behind after this disc, nothing strange when we consider what should be painful to its design, with smaller discs and concerts scattered and cold, while the shadow of this single disc was still expanding, confirming as one of the most deliciously depressing Discs of history.