10. Red House Painters - Old Ramon (2001): The last Red House Painters album sounds absolutely nothing like the first. Old Ramon famously sat in limbo for three years while Kozelek wrangled out of his deal with Island/Supreme Records; he bought it back and eventually released it on Sub Pop. Old Ramon is a weary-soundng album, and considering the crossroads at which Kozelek found himself, that weariness isn't surprising: He'd been dropped by his longtime home (4AD) after 1995's Ocean Beach, and his major-label debut, 1996's Songs For A Blue Guitar, was a commercial nonentity whose promotion was badly mangled by filmmaker John Hughes' vanity imprint, Supreme Records. Touring with the Painters was unrewarding and stressful -- as he admitted in a recent interview, "I’ll never forget some of those drives in the early days, like Seattle to Minneapolis, bottles of piss rolling around in the van. I’ve never been a hangin' with the pack kind of guy, so I was always a loner out there, even with the band." The Painters do their best to make that weariness sound warm and inviting, but the subsequent split seems inevitable in retrospect.



































