New Music Tuesday - Sun Kil Moon

Sun Kil Moon - April

4.5 out of 5



I'm glad I'm married to my first love, because Sun Kil Moon's new album is going to turn you into a giant, emotional, blubbering mess of a human being reminiscing about yours. If the album is titled "April" in order to appropriate an overall theme, it isn't the April of sunny days of backyard baseball or sundresses and Easter. This is the April of "showers" fame, of walking down a chilly, wind-blown street, of sitting inside on a gray day with nothing to do but think about lost loves and the past. In fact, I'm not sure if Mark Kozelek (Sun Kil Moon is little more than a stage name for Mark's solo work) knows how to write a song that isn't in the past-tense. If you are a nostalgic person at all, this album is your holy grail. Mark conjures images of friends and lovers, and shrouds them in idealism and longing. He does this atop a backdrop of the most trance inducing fingerpicked and/or fuzzy guitar until you are a part of his inward and backward looking world. If anyone knows and embraces his obsessive ability to dig up the past, its Kozelek, with lines like:


I have all these memories, I don't know what for.
I have them and I can't help it.
Some overflow and spill out like waves,
Some I will harbor for all of my days


Some part of me is amazed that he harbors any of his memories because he seems to tell a whole life in each song.


The album starts with a couple of distorted Neil Youngian epics (much in the same vein as his first SKM release, "Ghosts of the Great Highway"), "Lost Verses" and "The Light." They clock in at 9:43 and 7:50, respectively, but Mark finds a way to keep his songs from becoming exhaustive. If it is possible to be intricate and simple at the same time, that would describe his style. His music has many layers, whether from his intricate fingerpicking, layered solos, or vocals, but his songs are never hard to follow, as they were in his days as the leader of The Red House Painters. Once he finds some intricate pretty little thing, he plays it again and again, until it sounds so simple and so light. This is what leads to the meditative and lulling aura of this album. And just before a song starts to get too repetitive, he mixes it up, as he does in both "Lost Verses" and "Tonight in Bilbao," where at the end of the song he introduces a completely new beat and invigorated melody. These little shifts always come at just the right time, and breathe new life into a song you think you have figured out.


If the first two songs recall "Ghosts of the Great Highway," the rest of the CD is an amazing expansion on his latest CD, "Tiny Cities," both physically ("Tiny Cities" was barely a half hour long, while "April" is more than double that), and musically. The fingerpicking is incredible and moving. Songs like "Unlit Hallway" (which sounds beautiful with some vocals from Bonnie "Prince" Billy), "Tonight in Bilbao," and "Blue Orchids" demonstrate that Mark is still one of the most impressive and underrated guitar players around. The arpeggios in both the bridge and end of "Tonight in Bilbao" are mind-blowing, and in "Tonight the Sky" his solo noodles into fuzzy oblivion.


Despite all of the wonderful guitar and catching melodies, what really makes the album work is the way Mark Kozelek can spin a yarn. In the gorgeous song "Moorestown" he sings, as on most of the tracks, of a lost love. Obviously, this has been done before, but he has the ability to put you there, in the shoes of the protagonist, by using the starkest details while at the same time singing about somewhere that could be "Anytown, USA." "Her walls are Mediterranean blue/ Her baby sister picked the hue," against "We'd spend our days just driving round/ Old parking lots and neighborhoods/ Our framed and charming Moorestown."


I think time will tell if "April" will be as good as "Ghosts of the Great Highway," which I still consider to be Mark's finest work, because his music is enticing at first, but the more it's heard, the more it's understood and the finer it becomes. This is easily the best, most complete album I've heard this year, and I demand you pick it up. 74 minutes will never go by so fast again.

Buy it straight from Kozelek's

Caldo Verde Records (7.99 download)


Sun Kil Moon - Moorestown