Amazon.co.uk Review
It's been four years since
Red House Painters'
Songs For A Blue Guitar was released, with its near-legendary guitar solo on "More Like Paper" (allegedly the reason behind the Painters' parting of ways with their label, 4AD). Since then, legal difficulties have prevented the release of its follow-up,
Old Ramon. Fans, therefore, must content themselves with this haunting, acoustic solo record from singer Kozelek in the interim. It's as solemn, slow-paced and simmering as one would expect from the man who invented "slowcore", but nowhere near as meandering as his main group could sometimes be. Songs like "Around And Around" and the poignant elegy "Rose Marie" have a Denver-esque quality to them, while Kozelek's cover of AC/DC's youth anthem "Rock'N'Roll Singer" is almost unrecognisable. It's amazing what a little minimalism will do.
--Everett True
CD Description
This EP is the solo debut of Mark Kozelek, mastermind of California's Red House Painters, who quickly moved from lower-case American Music Club status to kings of the mope-rock roost. As evidenced by some of his previous artistic choices, Kozelek has a knack for carefully placed perversity and expertly veiled irony, and he continues that trend here.
As in the past, Kozelek makes some willfully bizarre choices of cover tunes, tackling no less than three AC/DC tunes and oneby John Denver. The master stroke here is that when he applies his mournful Nick Drake-via-Tim Hardin voice and elegantly picked acoustic guitar to these songs, they sound completely at home in his repertoire. The three original tunes are fully up to the level of Kozelek's Red House Painters work, full of casual beauty, gracefully presented sadness, and artful fragility.