Down Colorful Hill was the first slowcore album I ever heard, I’m pretty sure, and Red House Painters remain the best slowcore band. Kozelek’s evocative lyricism aside, Red House Painters were one of the only major slowcore bands to not view depression as synonymous with laziness, or at least they didn’t view their music that way.

Contemporaries like Low and Carissa’s Wierd (as much as they’re still good) rarely changed within a specific album and their emotion could border on empty redundance rather than tortuously complex by the time it was over. Red House Painters had some relatively surprising progressive guitar work and song structures that could further detail its sonic consciousness without ever breaking the heavily morose tone that defines slowcore.

Take “24” for instance, as the narrator comes to full realization in the final verse of the song that his life is slipping away, the song suddenly melts and breaks down into a disturbed psychedelic murk from which there is no rationalization any longer audible. “Medicine Bottle” is definitive slowcore, but the best song is the outlying “Lord Kill the Pain,” a jangly number akin to similarly depressed ’80s indie rock, albeit the bitter lyrics coming across as too deeply genuine to be anything but disturbing—much unlike anything penned by Morrissey.

Down Colorful Hill is probably the best of its movement. Who said slowcore had to be passionless?