Artist bio

See also: Sun Kil Moon

Mark Kozelek is a tough guy to figure out, what with his dual skill crafting painfully personal narratives and his penchant for un-ironically reinterpreting material by such mainstream rock forefathers as John Denver, AC/DC, and Kiss. Luckily, there’s no shortage of opportunity for amateur psychoanalysis on the records he makes as the leader of Red House Painters, a rock combo known equally for Kozelek's lacerating lyrics as for its sparse, guitar-driven epics. A series of mid-'90s albums on 4AD (including two distinct 1993 self-titled releases) made underground favorites out of the Painters and such like-minded acts as Low and Codeine, thanks to a modern spin on classic influences such as Nick Drake and Simon & Garfunkel. Contractual wrangling silenced the group from 1996-2001 until Sub Pop finally released the long-since-completed Old Ramon, which sports some of the Painters' finest work to date. Kozelek has also made forays into acting ("Almost Famous") and recorded solo, including What's Next To The Moon, a largely acoustic EP of AC/DC covers.

Albums by this artist

Old Ramon (Recommended) (2001)

Songs For A Blue Guitar (1996)

Red House Painters

Songs For A Blue Guitar

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» JONATHAN COHEN | SENIOR EDITOR

Red House Painters Songs For A Blue Guitar Supreme/Island, 1996 RiYL: Codeine, R.E.M., Mark Eitzel, Lisa Germano

Red House Painters frontman Mark Kozelek is a complex artist. As a poet, songwriter, singer and musician, Kozelek often refuses interviews. But he's also been known to call magazines prior to interviews to "prep" writers.

What does this have to do with his group's trademark alternative-folk leanings, featured on their first five releases on 4AD Records?

Despite Kozelek's nuances, listeners have come to expect two types of songs from the San Francisco-based group: sparse, acoustic tales of distress and love gone bad, and (drum roll...) sparse, electric tales of distress and love gone bad. You could color the Painters unpredictable within their own predictability, or just politely say that this isn't an overly spontaneous band.

Songs For A Blue Guitar, then, is a welcome display of deviance. Originally intended as a Kozelek solo album, Songs was recorded at "a studio out in the woods" where Kozelek "went to record without any rehearsals."

This change of approach pays big dividends on Songs, a beautiful album brimming with haunting imagery. Opener "Have You Forgotten" is the album's highlight, with Kozelek employing more of a straight-forward rhyme scheme than usual in his lyrics: "When we were kids / we hated things our parents did."

The title track features the first male-female duet on a RHP album, but the next track, "Make Like Paper," exposes the pretentious underbelly Painters' songs have been known to contain. Kozelek launches into a lengthy, nonsensical guitar solo that consumes most of the song's 12-minute running time.

The utterly bizarre take on Wings' "Silly Love Songs" is nearly 11 minutes long and similarly goes nowhere. The clincher is a droning riff repeated for nearly three minutes between the album's seventh and eighth songs.

But for every wayward tune, a real stunner waits in the wings. "All Mixed Up" is a wondrously abstract rendition of the Cars song that begins with a marching-band style snare drum roll. The build to the chorus and its subsequent transition are magnificent. Kozelek achingly sings "she said leave it to me / everything will be all right."

Songs For A Blue Guitar is a welcome change of pace to the Painters' fairly predictable, plodding earlier work. Could Kozelek be lightening up a little? From the consistency of his lyrical content, it's hard to say.

But judging from the few smile-inducing moments where he rocks out with authority, the sun might be out in Kozelek's normally cloudy sky.

JONATHAN COHEN | Jonathan Cohen co-created Nude As The News with his Indiana University mates Troy Carpenter and Ben French. When not traversing the globe for business and pleasure, he holds down the fort as a senior editor for Billboard in New York. Stop him and he just may ask, "what for lunch?"