DommeDamian
Imperfect, sensitive Aspie with a melody addiction
Gender: Male
Age: 23
Location: where the flowers grow. 
- #2
- Posted: 09/27/2024 21:24
- Post subject:
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Albummaster back at it again. Been listening to this quite a bit the last two months, even yesterday. This is my description of mine of my chart, ranked #49:
"Around 2015-2016, still in primary school and with the help of +, getting into folk, I chatted with an employee at my local hang-out club, about music things. One day, when I asked him what he was playing, he said some spoken word folk music and showed me the album cover for Sun Kil Moon’s Universal Themes. The minimalism of the artwork made me think I wouldn’t be into that kind of music (update 2024: I still really dislike that project, very bad). He then showed me a fraction of that discography, and the artwork for the album Benji was even more ugly or confusingly bland to choose as an album cover. A few weeks go by, and I discover that Anthony Fantano (whom I followed at the time) disliked Sheeran and then listed alternative choices to listen to, he then said the Sun Kil Moon album Benji was great. Then I saw his overwhelmingly positive review for that album, and decided to listen to it. I really liked it straight away and it sun became a favorite acoustic album (what little albums I knew in that realm tho).
During ’17 when I saw some of his other Koz reviews, he mentioned that he was in a 90s band called Red House Painters, and then flashed the cover for Rollercoaster. I didn’t think much of it other than that cover art was quite awesome. Then somewhere in the spring of ’18, I came across Red House Painters again on an all-time BEA-chart, where Rollercoaster was number one, user stating it’s the one album that “sums up my melancholic soul”. There, it caught enough of my attention to chance it. Same evening, I had koldskål in my fridge (copypaste the word into Google Images to see what I mean), and decided to hear the album whilst having that. I took their Bridge album along, since I thought s/t albums were always the go-to picks in discographies (I didn’t listen to Down Colorful Hill until July 2019 I believe). I loved Rollercoaster straight away, very easy to get into. I loved it juuuuuust enough for it to have a relatively low place in my top 100 just when I was getting into my 10-month challenge. Then, during the challenge, this became my favorite album of its month, and generally wanna the biggest risers on the chart. Benji quickly grew off me and dipped, Red House Painters’ Rollercoaster not only took its place, but never went down in enjoyment or impact. Easily a masterclass in being a filterless songwriter with grip.
Even though Down Colorful Hill has gotten almost as many rotations, most notably 2023 and 2024, Rollercoaster has remained superior, instrumentally and especially vocally and melodically. If DCH is the record of staying hiding inside, curtains closed, stale air making you more down, then Rollercoaster is the going outside, exploring observing the world, breathing fresh air, making a change in habits, and yet still be suicidal, down stressed and depressed type of album.
The tracks walk an extremely fine line between sadness and ecstacy, juxtaposing, conflating the two. Even when the underlying guitars and rhythms are fuller and pressing, they are always somewhat burrowed or dejected in the mixing or in tone. The guitars are obliquely melodic while never too colorful, expressively detailed or elaborate. The lead one 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 Mark 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. Kozelek's voice is almost like a ghost or from a dream, a depressed and almost ecstatic cry or haunted reflection.
Every passage is an impressionistic vignette. They are attempts to touch the past, to reach out and touch someone or experience happy feelings, only to not be able to because one is as if a ghost or in a dream. These incidents and realities were/are too much to bear and now interconnected as irrevocable trauma. They cannot be brought back.
Rollercoaster is actually the name of two 38-minute albums, mashed into one. One being four long slowcore odysseys that is both true successor and maybe perfecter of DCH. First off, the iconic Katy Song, unbelievable masterpiece that is wanna the few songs I could see myself fitting in on many a locational altercation; it can feel so right listening to this from in the life of isolated nature, to in the middle of a rainy cyberpunk night. The final part is pure devastation as it’s like the musical symbolization of him being erased from her mind - which in broader term, when he ended with “Without you what does my life amount to”, also means it’s him crying his last bit of life into the thick air of guitars.
Funhouse is a lonesome sepia void in the first half, a slow core jangle pop instrumental in the transition, and awakens the Shoegaze in its second half, where the guitar emulates a male scream, before the Koz drips wordless crying into it.
The vignettes move in tragedy on Mother, when the guitar is about to burst any moment during its first half, and the scenario uses surrealism for its weapon in the second half. Mark lets out his most religious mourn, and the instruments produce a scarily sharp shooting sound.
Fourthly there’s Strawberry Hill, pretty much a Paisley Underground cousin to Medicine Bottle, but more about childhood sadness.
The other album being the mere accessible lengthed conventional 10-track singer-songwriter record, the Koz beats commercialization at its own game. Some even build RHP’s Dream Pop to full form; New Jersey is neighbor to Mazzy Star and Dragonflies is nocturnal Cocteau Twins. The amazing Things Mean A Lot is almost whimsical with that piano, and its chorus is wanna my favorite truth bombs in any song I love: “Things mean a lot at the time, don’t mean nothing later”. Though this record is more than a thing, since it has meant a lot a minute. I’m reminded every time I’m hit with Grace Cathedral Park’s heaviness.
I have never heard a song that so openly turns friend- and relationship status on its head, the same way that Take Me Out do that by Mark asking this other person to either take him out (like out in the city/a date) cause he is dying within of loneliness, or take him out (like kill him) cause he is dying within of lack of knowledge and willpower to anything.
Besides the acoustically atmospheric fragment of traumatic honesty Down Through, the most minimalistic cut here is New Jersey, here the voice seem to be at the forefront alongside a harmonizing female vocalist, and it’s gorgeous from top to bottom. I rarely skip singing along to this one.
The first version of Mistress is their flawless take on Shoegaze. But in Rollercoaster’s fashion, there is another version, a strict naked piano version. I think it’s necessary for both of them to be here, the Shoegaze song is messy and shows how Koz’s life is after him and Katy are over (hence why it’s sequenced right after her song). He ain’t fulfilled at all by the toxic relationship of meaningless sex and materialism that they had and ends it. By the piano one, he is more clearheaded, and longs for any typea true connection. He makes an effort to endure pain for it as he doesn’t want to be lonely anymore. As well as the lyric “I want a piece of these brutal beatings and name callings”.
Even the more lyrically bright songs like the title track (him listing things in the world he likes and features a delightful flanger guitar), urgent Dragonflies and the less than two minute closer Brown Eyes, it’s still in tune and spiritual family with the sad ones.
Rollercoaster is a distinct character of an elongated and inescapable existential quandary, of wandering through an endless outdoors dream, and sometimes, of endless slow-motion falling. The melancholic soul of an unfolding album like Rollercoaster, will give your emotional numbness some color and flowery because of that, its brushes are thick enough to get its passages onto the heart."
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My Top 100 :
www.besteveralbums.com/thechart.php?c=4...amp;page=1
My music:
- www.hyperfollow.com/dommedamian
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