When folks online try to catalogue which artists made up the ill-defined “slow-core” scene of the early-90s, they typically settle on the following five bands: Galaxie 500, Codeine, Bedhead, Low, and Red House Painters. Of these five, Red House Painters might be the biggest outlier of all; for though they sometimes played as slowly and quietly as Low or Codeine (as in the video above), other times their songs were not especially slower than, say, any other singer-songwriter you could name (it’s tempting to say that if Red House Painters is considered “slow-core,” then so is every Indie-acoustic act out there).
They were also (if we’re grading on a curve) probably the Poppiest of the “slow-core” bands, the most melodic, the least abrasive, the least cryptic, and with the prettiest vocals this side of Mimi Parker. For that matter, Codeine, Bedhead, and Low are all emphatically cold-weather music; Red House Painters by contrast is overwhelmingly summer music.
Yet like every other “slowcore” group besides Low, they also quietly dissipated by the end of the ’90s; after a strong start in 1992, frontman Mark Kozelek formally dissolved Red House Painters in 2001 in order to launch his next band Sun Kil Moon, which really did become just a straight-forward singer-songwriter act. But 2001 was still longer than Codeine, Bedhead, and Galaxie 500 lasted. As I have noted before, part of what made Low’s longevity so astonishing is that the vast majority of “slow-core,” even more so than other Punk and Indie genres, simply isn’t built to last.
I had previously posited that Codeine, for example, collapsed in 1994 because they couldn’t bear the irresolvable tension of the silences, whereas Low found its resolution in the silences itself; but that might just be another way of saying that slow-core, despite its purported “low” energy, is actually a young man’s game, and requires deep wells of youthful energy to sustain.
Take for example “24,” the haunting first track off Red House Painter’s first LP, 1992’s Down Colorful Hill. Lyrically, it is rather straightforwardly about the subtle melancholy of, well, turning 24 years old (in this sense, it is a spiritual predecessor to Jimmy Eat World’s “23“–or even Blink-182’s “What’s My Age Again“). If you older folks stop your sniggering for a moment and dare remember how you yourself felt at that age, 24 is when you quietly begin age out of youth; at 24, you have either completed college, or are about to (especially if you are an RM at the BYUs). Up until roughly the age of 24, all the possibilities of your future–what electives to take, what to major in, what careers to explore, what people to date, where to live, where to go–have been steadily expanding and opening up before you; but now the doors begin to shut, as your endless possibilities begin to close off and shrink again.
For example: You might still become, say, a doctor or a lawyer, but now you must actually choose one or the other, or even neither, with the dread assurance that you will most likely never get to try the other path again–or if you do ever try another career path, or start another relationship, or move to a new town, it will be with much greater difficultly than when you were a college student just a couple of years earlier. Your brain also purportedly finishes developing at 24–which also means it now begins decaying. Music won’t hit you as hard as it did before; your tastes and opinions will begin to calcify; and unless you make definite and concerted efforts otherwise, your worldview also begins to narrow as much as your possibilities.
Yet even if you stay mentally sharp, 24 is when your body will begin to betray you, too. At 24 you are now entering your mid-20s, on the other side of which is when you will soon form your first wrinkles and sprout your first gray hairs. 24 is when your youth, even if it certainly isn’t gone yet, does indeed begin to silently slip away. Red House Painters’ “24” absolutely nails that subtle feeling just right, and is a track I really wish I’d first heard back when I turned 24.
But turning 24 is also not a moment you can linger in, at least not for long; and if the band quickly moved onto other topics in their other albums, they nevertheless still played with that sense of being 20-somethings trying to figure out their place in the world. Hence, when the members of Red House Painters finally aged out of their 20s entirely by the end of the decade, there really was nothing else left to do but let the band dissipate as well and drift on to other projects. They couldn’t even artificially sustain that feeling.
And it is here that I must also acknowledge that in 2020, a Pitchfork article revealed that Mark Kozelek has been accused of “sexual misconduct” by three women; and while he has aggressively denied the allegations, he had also spent the previous decade increasingly squandering fan goodwill through one-sided insult wars with other bands, loudly and vulgarly antagonizing reporters, interviewers, and even audience members, and complaining repeatedly about society’s “desexualization of people as they age”–all of which behaviors, even if the allegations turn out to be unfounded, still betray a man who has clearly never reconciled with the aging process, who has finally succumbed to bitter-old-man status, who has never really found a way to move forward with his life after turning 24. (These are among the reasons why I’ve never really gotten into his post-Red House Painters output.)
Low, however, was able to age gracefully in both their music and in their worldview as they continued to record; and if I might be so bold, I dare say it was because they had internalized a doctrine of eternal progression.
If you have no sense that you can continue to progress into the next life, then you have no sense that can continue to progress in this life, either. Brigham Young once said this life is as important as any other in the eternities; that is, we do not wait to join eternity, we are already in the midst of it. (Such is perhaps why Low was that rare band to make its most daring and adventurous music at the very end of their career). But without that sense of eternal progression, then you really will feel like something infinite and eternal has closed off as you exit your youth, with no way to recover it.
I need to be careful here, because my point is not to chauvinistically or smugly celebrate our faith–quite the opposite: it is to remind us ourselves that if we are not continually progressing within this life, no matter what professional distinctions we may acquire in our careers or even what offices we end up holding within the Church, then we are no better. To be damned means literally to not progress; and if we are still reading the same books and listening to the same music and thinking the same thoughts and bearing the same testimonies in age as we did in our youth, then we too will dissipate—indeed, we will already have dissipated. This does not mean we abandon or reject the art of our youth (though sometimes that’s exactly what we must do); no, as we read in Abraham, we keep our first estate, and then have further added upon our heads forever and ever. But we have to make a conscious effort to do so. Otherwise, we really do grow old.
Red House Painters’ first four albums, by they way–Down Colorful Hill, Red House Painter I (Rollercoaster), Red House Painter II (Bridge), and Ocean Beach–are all gorgeous, and were truly full-band efforts (not just the Mark Kozelek show they would later devolve into). Despite the bitter old man Kozelek would sadly later become, these early efforts are well worth adding upon to yourself as well.