Red House Painters consists of Anthony Koutsos (percussion), Jerry Vessel (bass guitar), Mark Kozelek (guitar, lead vocals), Phil Carney (guitar).
Red House Painters is an alternative rock group formed in 1989 in San Francisco by singer/songwriter Mark Kozelek. They are described, along with American Music Club, as one of the lynchpins 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.
Kozelek was a troubled teenager in the 1980s, being addicted to drugs at a very early age. He entered rehab intermittently during those years and began to play guitar. While in Atlanta, he became friends with Anthony Koutsos, a drummer. He then moved to San Francisco, adding guitarist Gorden Mack and bassist Jerry Vessel to complete the lineup for Red House Painters.
They signed up with 4AD Records in England in 1992. 4AD issued the group's first demos as an album entitled Down Colorful Hill. It was a compilation of haunting melodies complemented by Kozelek's eerie yet rich and emotional vocals. In 1993, the group came out with two self-titled records (now commonly refered to as Rollercoaster and Bridge based on their cover artwork), solidifying Kozelek's reputation as a talented songwriter with their harrowing autobiographical tales of his troubled life and errant living with no punches being pulled. The music, which ran the gamut from beautiful acoustic folk-rock to intense, dissonant, lengthy soundscapes, effectively conveyed the sadness of the lyrics.
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 and comfort of memory, a subject that would become an obsession in his subsequent recordings.