Taking its name from a Spanish children’s book, Old Ramon emerges after laying away for nearly four years since San Francisco’s Red House Painters put the ten-song collection to tape. While the late-’90s major-label merger kept Old Ramon tucked away, principal Painter Mark Kozelek remained busy, issuing a pair of solo records (one of which reinvents a clutch of AC/DC tunes) and appearing in Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous.
Even so, it is a welcome and warm reality that this album’s near-mythic status as a long-lost gem has rather quietly unwended itself. Now that the cat’s out of the bag — quite literally, in the case of the opening sweet ode to Kozelek’s kitty — Old Ramon shows its face as a sloe-eyed late-night companion. Part skillfully executed hymn of gratitude, part unapologetic confessional, the songs play as part of a whole — sexy, deep, and, as ever, hungry to express need.
Less linear and crunch-heavy than the sonically stellar and emotionally engaging Songs For A Blue Guitar (essentially a Kozelek solo record in all but name), Old Ramon is rooted in anticipatory meandering. Rarely do the songs really go anywhere. They aren’t about arriving at a place so much as evoking the feeling of dwelling deeply in the in between places: the dreamy groove, the greedy drone of atmospheric post-rock, sideways country steel and acoustic folk interplay, with just enough specificity for the music to hold and hang together.
Commitment to an esoteric now morphs into something so beautiful as the blissed out guitar melody a quarter into “River”, at which point the song throws up a mirror and inverts on itself, playing out to nearly twelve minutes of hazy, shimmering guitar glory, delicately undercut by rumble, buzz and bad attitude.