Red House Painters
Ocean Beach

THE REVIEW

The salinity of the air.

I think about this while listening to "Ocean Beach," and, following the free associations guided by the assonance of the titles, I remember another beach, Neil Young's, 1974. I wonder what this emotional affinity between two such distant albums depends on, and the cover of "On The Beach" comes back to mind. So much wind. Quite normal to expect it by the ocean, but there is something unnatural in that landscape that doesn't depend on the violence of the wind, nor on the buried Cadillac, but on the smells instead.

Indeed, the salinity is missing, that mineral lightness that the sea air carries, I cannot feel it because it is probably an urban wind, dense, passed through streets and sidewalks, more similar to the consistency of stagnant air in cellars than to the volatility of a breeze. The season of the sea has not yet arrived.

It is precisely the wind that unites the two albums. Immersed in the same atmospheric conditions, Kozelek breathes the same desalinated oxygen.

The difference between "Ocean Beach" and the previous works is played on the fine line that divides sadness from melancholy. A few degrees of separation but that result in tangible changes. Because sadness is a static feeling, it numbs you by pinning you to the present, while that vague and intimate sorrow that is melancholy gives enough freedom to traverse emotional space and reach memories. And here they come to the surface, light as only dead images can be, they are ordered details of a whole still to be deciphered.

No longer whispers, Kozelek abandons himself to a song, still delicate, but fuller and more robust, accompanied by gentle guitars that draw pure melodies. The opening "Cabezon," with its carefree gait, immediately warns us that something is imperceptibly changing; "San Geronimo" and "Over My Head" confirm the impression. But it is the strings that embellish "Summer Dress," the subdued piano of "Drop," or "Red Carpet" stained with a still fresh pain, that rebuild with the fabric of defeat that layer of poetic despair, perhaps now less thick, but from whose weight Kozelek cannot free himself