Red House Painters — “Mistress” — Red House Painters
My favorite way to wallow: 1. Put this album on. 2. Lie down in the bathtub with the shower going. A brilliant songsmith in the melancholy tradition, Mark Kozelek never fails to devastate. Sure, the originally Euro-centric 4AD label has attracted its share of idiosyncratic and despairing American freaks over the years (His Name Is Alive’s Warren Defever, The Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle), but Kozelek is a standout for translating his troubled existence into sepia filters rather than assaultive sonics or blistering vocals. Each song, as sprawling as they occasionally are, has a cutting sense of smallness, of a poison beetle preserved in amber; they actually sound more interesting at low volume. “Mistress” exemplifies Kozelek’s rock miniaturism through subdued production, its layers of quicksilver guitar fuzz oddly distinct from one another as they pile up to the inevitable, and escapes the twin shadows of Joy Division and The Cocteau Twins so easily it defies all critical genealogy. It’s no surprise Kozelek’s recent output with Sun Kil Moon is pitch-pefect given the wise-beyond-his-years delivery here, on a first proper album some sixteen years ago, as an eerily calm baritone eye at the center of pure swirl. But the detail that stings every single time is his uncomfortable slant rhyme of “mysterious” with “mistress,” which says as much as a Chekov story, and much less.
