Word: kozelek
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...this album formulaic? By all means. Comparisons to other, more renowned artists abound on the first listen. In González’s Rome, beautifully-proportioned busts of Simon and Garfunkel adorn museums and villas. Mark Kozelek (of the Red House Painters) paints riffs on a Sistine ceiling for bossa nova Pope João Gilberto...
...emotional self following some interminable psychological chaos--a kind of writer's block, a lover's block. Bashfully and impulsively, their songs attempt to define themselves, to heal their centers, achieve form, succeed, each reaching out delicate as snail antennae hoping to rebut the past. Admittedly, as Kozelek acknowledged, his songs sometimes come off "whiny and pretentious" but most of the time meaningful, as when in "Uncle Joe" the narrator pleads, I'm looking at the ceiling with an awful feeling of loss / and loneliness. / The after late-night television pain I'm / running out of strength...
...matter how intensely the bitterness for civilization's trespass conflicted with the sweetness of Kozelek's and Red House Painters' presence on Sunday night, nothing plagued the performance more than the choice of venue. With its blatant hybridization of Roman Mythology and medieval macabre, complete with apsidal carvings on the wooden booths, gruesome charcoal drawings of pregnant women ohne Bustenhalter, and hanging skeletons, Aerosmith's nascent Mama Kin club screams, drools, and bleeds for perverse, unrestrained if highly orchestrated debaucheries, preferably of Homo sapiens. Two domineering, heavily-stocked bars squat facing each other across the red-rimmed, black linoleum dance...
Hence, seven songs into the Red House Painters' set, and with the apparently virile contingent beginning to become intolerably restless, a kid blurted out, "Would you play, 'Make Like Paper,' or at least something that rocks?'" Not missing a beat, Kozelek responded, "Who the Hell did you think you were coming to see?" But this misunderstanding, or missed expectation, epitomizes the contradiction that existed between the venue and the band on Sunday night, and also the reason why it became more awkward and discomfiting to experience Red House Painters live, in spite of their bravura performances, than in the cold...
Lead singer Mark Kozelek is a semihandsome, but hlplessly stray; masculine Medusa. Sadness' vicar...