POO: Red House Painters

Incredible note gathered from Kozelek: "The chorus of Strawberry Hill ... was sung by a group of strangers we gathered from outside the Divisadero Street studio where we were recording."

-- nabisco (nabisco), Thursday, June 23, 2005 10:25 AM

Shit that song "Dragonflies" is amazing- I just listened to it for the first time while reading along to the lyrics that Chris V. posted up thread- fucking spine-chilling! And I've had the album for years!

Summer Dress

Anyone else gets a tiny bit annoyed when he rhymes "nice" with "nice" on Have You Forgotten?

And my pick would be their cover of the Cars' "All Mixed Up", also one of the best musical recontextualizations I've heard.

SF folx, do you know which studio this was?

― Steve Shasta, Thursday, April 12, 2007 9:10 AM (4 years ago)

I'm pretty sure there used to be a recording studio by where the Little Chihuahua is on by Page Street in one of the old Victorians. I used to get pizza at that Bus Stop pizza when I was a freshman in college and I remember one being around there. I used to live at Page @ Pierce at the time.

Sundays and holidays hits home hard when my wife got sick.

And i started this thread long time ago

Anyone else gets a tiny bit annoyed when he rhymes "nice" with "nice" on Have You Forgotten?

no. find it more annoying that he is the thousandth person to lift that "fade into you" chord progression on the title track

such a weird, flawed record. i don't think i've ever even listened to it all the way through. in my estimation old ramon is a much better weird flawed record and yet with much more egregious lyrical moments

also why do rhp people fixate over katy song? overwrought pretentious lyrics...the only good part is towards the end where he runs that mantra into the ground,

fade into you and blue guitar are both copped from a velvet underground song though

what song? i don't know velvet undergorned's music that well. i always think of it as knocking on heaven's door thing

Tonight: "Shadows". She didn't say anything I didn't already know, so I went home and put on Ocean Beach.

drop for me.

or katy

grace cathedral park.

or katy.

strawberry hill is pretty amazing actually. not sure if i ever listened to it before. i don't understand why it is not on my ipod which has only the first ten songs from rollercoaster. have there been different cd editions? i can't check as i have the cd near frankfurt and i am in berlin now.

I don't think there's been different editions, neither wiki or allmusic had anything about that. So no answer to your little mystery. Maybe your ipod was full?

Void, live @ Hultsfred 1997. I remember how disappointing the studio version seemed in comparison when Old Ramon finally dropped.

Discogs is a great place to find out about all of the versions of something.

I can never figure out if "Funhouse" is really great or really bad.

Make Like Paper, yall. and like welcome to obvioustown but Have You Forgotten has to be one of the greatest singer-songwriter-y tracks released in my lifetime.

most recent obsession is Between Days from Old Ramon tho

Good stuff upthread about Strawberry Hill. Hadn't listened to it in gawd knows how long. That chorus is spectacular.

Still, though -- Wop-a-Din-Din.

most recent obsession is Between Days from Old Ramon tho

aw man this song is super great

love the guitar tone throughout old ramon and then also on ghosts

"Take Me Out"

;_;

in response to a comment made a few posts upthread, i find Funhouse to be an astonishing commentary on nostalgia. soberingly despondent and engulfed in alien emotion, yet wholly atmospheric and grounded in memory -- a tribute to arbitrary snapshots of life and their meaning.

these days, i would put Dragonflies forward as the best representation of the impact this band has on me.

just listened to Funhouse and to add to the remarks i made just now, it's one of the shortest 9-minute journeys that i can think of. i mean it's slow, but not slow for slowness' sake, more as a means of zoning in for extended lengths on fragments of activity and emotion suspended in another time and place, like a slideshow set on crawl.

by "shortest", i mean it has me under its spell and i never pay attention to the playing time.

I meant musically, and was referring to many of the dissonant chord movements that appear during some bridges and elsewhere, like the heaviness of the song is making it hard for the notes to hit their marks. It would sound sloppy to someone without knowing Mark's ability as a guitar player. The love/hate comes from my enjoyment of it by myself but the awkwardness of making someone else sit through it with me, understanding how it sounds like it's trudging it's way through the nine minutes if you aren't paying close attention to it's intended mood. The point where the song begins to unravel is where the distortion comes in, or when the la's happen soon afterwards, and for a song with an already slow pace this part feels like walking through mud. Again, I love it normally but if you throw someone unfamiliar in the room with me, I am immediately sensitive to what makes it a chore to listen to.

I also agree upthread about Have You Forgotten, this is the song that I discovered them with. It's one of those songs where I wish I knew how to arrange strings so I could transpose this for an orchestra to add heartbreaking swells behind him as he plays.

Evan, to the uninitiated i'm sure Funhouse would be a very trying slog and a lot of hard work. it's kind of funny really -- i get a lot of emotional resonance from it, but never feel confronted or destabilised as i'm sure a lot of listeners do. i guess that that in itself is a testament to the impact of the song, that it turns people off or makes them feel uncomfortable to the extent that their mood or outlook is affected. i think it's interesting what you say about the end of the song and its means of rendering an already a-musical and unconventional soundscape even more jarring and bare. in many ways it's a retread of the structure of Katy Song, albeit with less humanity and warmth. i think Funhouse has some of the qualities that are representative of Rollercoaster as whole -- it's long, indulgent, sprawling and intermittently sloppy, but there's still the sense that every last inch of it needs to be there, laid bare just as it is. i can't imagine any of it missing.

More great originals from me

Katy Song
New Jersey (either version depending on mood)
Have you forgotten
Grace Cathedra Park

Ok sorry - pressed too early- big zzzs

Katy Song

Okay, nabisco's post led me to listen to Strawberry Hill ~20 times in the past few days. Favorite part: the fuzzed out guitar that shows up on the "now for dinner" line. Could listen to that chorus for days and days. Actually wish the song were longer...

the demo of "funhouse" does something a little more lively with the ending https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8xNJmtIx1k

you really wonder how it got the way it did on record. but i love the song; i think justin broadrick (from godflesh and jesu) has talked about how much he loves red house painters, and the last few minutes of "funhouse" are pure godflesh.

wow, the demo is pretty cool and probably more of a palatable length for most people to accommodate.

what's everyone's opinion of Mother? for me, that was the most challenging song for me to approach on Rollercoaster. RHP never got more mopey than that.

i'm currently obsessing over River from Old Ramon. i think there might be an element of tribute to Neil Young at play. it's a deeply complex song, gentle and free-flowing as a whole, but somehow really dark with sporadic forays into unsettling and obscure territories. strikes me as a bit of a precursor to Duk Koo Kim.

holy shit, "Helicopter", what a sleeper of a song. it has actually been caving into my everyday thoughts quite a bit. i really enjoy the RHP songs that probe the symptoms of a problem in intense detail to the point that Koz riles himself up and emerges as a bit mentally imbalanced. "Uncle Joe" is a similar kind of song in that respect. the Bridge album is a bit undervalued, i think. it's basically one harrowing slow-burner after another.

I had never picked up that Bridge record until a few months ago and became obsessed immediately with it. "I Am A Rock" was in my head for days. The original version of that does not have the same effect on me.