Red House Painters: Retrospective

It's encouraging to see that Red House Painters has been deemed worthy of a two-disc retrospective at this point in its career: Throughout the '90s, the San Francisco band has made some of the most elegantly mopey, emotionally barren music this side of Nick Drake. But it's also been artistically uneven, as Retrospective illustrates: About every other Red House Painters record (the self-titled 1993 album with the roller coaster on the cover, Ocean Beach) is great, while the other (the self-titled 1993 record with the bridge on the cover, Down Colorful Hill) is a lumbering, melody-starved mess. Retrospective spans the group's output on the 4AD label, stopping short of its first disc for Island (the uneven Songs For A Blue Guitar), and it hits on many career highs and lows. The best of the best is included on the first disc, with "Grace Cathedral Park," "Mistress," "Rollercoaster," and the eight-minute masterpiece "Katy Song" nicely representing the roller-coaster album, while "Summer Dress," "San Geronimo," and the similarly sprawled-out epic "Drop" serve as some of Ocean Beach's highlights. But the rest of the previously released tracks are a mixed bag: The cover of Kiss' "Shock Me" is a successful experiment—the single's two great B-sides should have been included, too, especially since they're referenced in the liner notes—but Down Colorful Hill's "Medicine Bottle" sounds like plodding high-school angst poetry. The second disc is mostly demos, with a couple of live tracks and outtakes thrown in; the results are uniformly underwhelming for all but the most diehard fans—who are, of course, those most likely to seek out Retrospective in the first place. Those people will be much better served by a new studio album, the release of which remains up in the air after this spring's corporate mega-merger, while the uninitiated would be wise to focus instead on acquiring the albums from which Retrospective's best material is drawn.