Red House Painters

Red House Painters was an alternative rock band from San Francisco, CA, United States, formed in 1989 by singer/songwriter Mark Kozelek. The band is described, along with Low and American Music Club, as one of the linchpins of the slowcore movement in alternative rock. Kozelek used this group primarily as a vehicle for his very personal and emotional songs of despair, pain and suffering. In 1994, they released an EP entitled Shock Me and in 1995, the introspective Ocean Beach, which saw Kozelek’s songs becoming more acoustic-based and folk influenced, and featured far less of the lengthy, dreamlike epics of the group’s first two albums. His lyrics also showed a considerable shift in tone, as he increasingly began to write about the power of memory and the significance of geography, a subject that would become an obsession in his subsequent recordings. What’s Next to the Moon was comprised entirely of shimmering, melancholy acoustic AC/DC covers from the Bon Scott era. The record was also greatly uncharacteristic of Kozelek in that it is the shortest full length to date clocking in at just over thirty minutes. Even the first Red House Painters album with only six tracks was more than 45 minutes in length.