Red House Painters - Demo Tape (1991)

Hey all! I'm the person who paid more than I'm willing to admit to buy the demo tape posted here last week. It arrived today in excellent condition and I immediately went to work digitizing it.

Here's a few notes I made while listening:

1. Anthem is Star-Spangled Banner, with the name likely shortened to better fit on a J-card.

2. The artist credited for the cover design - Amy Balkin - is a rather accomplished artist.

3. All of the songs are more or less in their final form, albeit the occasional changed lyric here and there.

4. Turns out Mark's protracted, unintelligible screaming in the second half of Blindfold has lyrics - they seem to be "when you're off and I'm alone".

5. This demo tape seems to be from 1991, as the version of Helicopter on the tape is identical to the demo version included in their Retrospective compilation, which provides a date of 1991.

6. None of these songs appeared on the 90-minute-long demo tape they sent to 4AD, which opens up the possibility that there are even more demos of early songs whose tapes never surfaced.

7. Someone was sick during tracking; you can hear an occasional cough throughout the tape.

8. This might be a stretch, but this set of songs seems to be an exercise in fictional storytelling or metaphor (aside from Anthem obviously). Contrary to almost RHP's entire discography, Helicopter and Blindfold are written from the perspective of two different characters rather than Mark, and the ambiguity in Mother's lyrics combined with this new context makes me wonder if it was also written from a fictional perspective.