Album of the day (#3292): Red House Painters (Rollercoaster)

[albummaster]

Today's album of the day

Red House Painters (Rollercoaster) by Red House Painters (View album | Buy this album)

Year: 1993.
Country:
Overall rank: 644
Average rating: 81/100 (from 326 votes).

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Tracks:
1. Grace Cathedral Park
2. Down Through
3. Katy Song
4. Mistress
5. Things Mean A Lot
6. Funhouse
7. Take Me Out
8. Rollercoaster
9. New Jersey
10. Dragonflies
11. Mistress [Piano Version]
12. Mother
13. Strawberry Hill
14. Brown Eyes

About album of the day: The BestEverAlbums.com album of the day is the album appearing most prominently in member charts in the previous 24 hours. If an album, or artist, has previously been selected within a x day period, the next highest album is picked instead (and so on) to ensure a bit of variety. A full history of album of the day can be viewed here.

[DommeDamian]

If you said it was the best piece of art in history, I WOULD NOT ARGUE!

In my 10-month challenge, I think it was the highest climber on my chart. Going from 87 to 33, and are now at 15.
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[CharlieBarley]

I only discovered this album recently, this year or late last year, and it's a corker. Brilliant album.

[AfterHours]

Not quite Down Colorful Hill, but a tremendous follow up, among the masterpieces of slowcore and of all time.

And certainly one of the most moving albums ever recorded.

It is a masterpiece of impressionism, never truly becoming a detailed, explicit whole, while overwhelmingly allusory.

The songs walk an extremely fine line between sadness and ecstacy, juxtaposing, conflating the two. Even when the underlying guitars and rhythms are fuller, relatively energetic and pressing, they are always somewhat burrowed or dejected in the mix or in tone. Kozelek's voice is almost like a ghost or from a dream, a depressed and almost ecstatic cry or haunted reflection, growing over the passages like a shadow then fading almost at the same time, reaching out for but never wholly amongst the impressionist scenic reflections (instrumentation). The guitars are obliquely melodic while never too colorful, expressively detailed or elaborate. Infact, the notes and passages seem carefully employed to just touch upon the scene or emotion in fragmentary allusions so as to give but a hint or sense of it, but never more, so as to always perpetuate the sense of suspended melancholic/wistful impressionism. The lead guitar often opens songs or portions of songs with inklings of melodic fragments (or plays circling figures that persist throughout) that are the incoming memories into being, gently recalled, as if the vocalist has just had this refreshed by a reminder in the environment or something that happened to him, now impressed upon the mind, the rest of the song its lonely rumination.

Every passage is an impressionistic vignette. They are not detailed expressions of emotions or scenes; they are impressions, still-lifes captured amongst a greater whole, moments in time paused and contemplated in infinite nostalgia -- each word, each verse, each hanging quandary, is fading, dropping slowly off the mouth, the instrumentation slowly from the hands, in a suspended graceful fade, in a long and aching or wistful goodbye. They are aftermaths, a sad and protracted shock, a retreat to an artificial haven of ecstacy following too much loss and devastation. They are attempts to touch the past, to reach out and touch someone or feel something again, to feel real happiness again, only to not be able to because one is as if a ghost or in a dream trying to "touch" reality but can't. These incidents and realities were/are too much to bear and now interconnected as irrevocable trauma. They can't be brought back.

The relation of the "hovering" vocals and the "anchored" instrumentation are a constant metaphor for all of the above in that they always sound impressionistic relative to the other by way of being semi elusive, but also complimentary, juxtaposed and in deft or poetic rhythmic relay to the opposite's expression; the "hovering" vocals are the more direct conveyance of the protagonist, the "reminiscing" instrumentation representative of the impressionistic memories taking the place of the physical space around him, and that he can't wholly touch or feel again but is attempting to hold on to, deal with or embrace.

This all gives the whole work the character of an elongated and inescapable existential quandary, of philosophic wandering through an endless dream, and sometimes, of endless slow-motion falling.
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[mickilennial]

Grace Cathedral Park is pretty much perfect.