Sun Kil Moon
Common As Light And Love Are Red Valleys Of Blood
[Rough Trade]
On his remarkable and critically acclaimed 2014 record, Benji, Mark Kozelek revisited numerous potent moments from his life, many of them traumatic and involving death, with detailed diaristic lyrics. At one of the most poetic and transcendent moments on the penultimate track Micheline, he recalls visiting his ailing grandmother’s house in LA with the line, “It was the first time I saw hummingbird or a palm tree, or a lizard, or saw an ocean, or heard David Bowie’s Young Americans, and I saw the movie Benji in the theatre.” It was my favourite line on the record and one that, despite Kozelek’s reputation for being abrasive, illustrated his ability to paint tenderness so vividly in his best songs.
On Philadelphia Cop, the third track on this remarkably long record (only four of sixteen tracks come in under seven minutes), Kozelek resorts to simply reciting the tracklisting of Young Americans at one point, midway through a riff about the recently deceased Bowie. It’s illustrative of how far down the road late-era Kozelek has gone with the what-I-did-today song format, and throughout he continues to rip straight from his diary in excruciating detail.
It’s deeply underwhelming, and there is precious little poetry to be found in what feels a man reading out largely disinteresting blog posts over slinky, two-chord acoustic jams.
Like this? Try these:
À la recherche du temps perdu, Volumes I-VII
Samuel Pepys
blogspot.com
Words – Ian Lamont
