Red House Painters - Down Colorful Hill (1992), 8/10

Down Colorful Hill is an immediately gratifying mix of depressed songwriting with droning yet colorful instrumentation: what slowcore provides in its finest moments. Beginning with the ethereal "24" provides a perfect start to unearth a feeling of longing, combining Mark's biting lyrics with sparse, but perfectly complementary instrumentation. The vocal performance in "Medicine Bottle" is chilling, and while this track has immediate gravity, it unravels a beautiful story during its satisfying individual passages. The song is wonderfully dark, both in its message and sonic appeal, but surrounded by optimism. The record achieves an admirable space. transporting us to the world of a young man exploring various relationships in a wonderfully existential fashion. "Michael" is a beautiful closer, ending the journey in a positive, warm tone against an eerie and ethereal foundation. This is a very surprisingly mature and mastered sound for any debut, and though the band would draw from similar wells in future releases, this is their most powerful and individually forceful recording. This is perhaps due to the necessity of rawness and poetic exploration of the present themes to support the record’s effectiveness. There is a very specific feeling of pain you may hear not just in Mark's vocals, but in each instrumental performance, especially coming forth from Kozelek and Mack’s guitars and, in many key moments, Vessel’s bass. Of course, Koutsos’ percussion is essential and strikingly tight in such a slow set of songs. Slowcore is a very fitting genre ethos for this particular aspect of the music, although it is limiting when considering the wide range of aesthetics and motifs explored by the lyrics and accompanying instrumentation. There is a notable juxtaposition of lyrics and instrumental tone in many of these songs such as the opener “24”, that contains such tragedy, but is such an easy and frictionless listening experience. A track like “Medicine Bottle” is more blatantly melancholic, but songs like “Lord Kill the Pain” or “Michael” sound giddy in comparison, despite the continued depressive passages to complement them. Kozelek carries much of the record’s impact with his lyrics, but it would be nothing without the band’s superbly ethereal yet neat backing. Down Colorful Hill exists as one of the strongest folk releases of the nineties and, in my view, of all time.