sun kil moon?

It's great! It just is much less great than the AFP style to me.

(Just noticed, having ordered from Caldo Verde for the 2 disc version and bonus live album, that Amazon are claiming to be stocking the limited 2-disc version in the UK, for a tenner anyway).

i still hate nils cline

and nels lofgren too

For an admitted fanboy of RHP, I had a fairly pronounced dropoff with Koz circa the first SKM record. Sadly, this doesn't restore much interest for me.

somehow the wonder of life prevails

Admiral Fell Promises may be a top 3 favorite album ever (so far) for me. Young Love was my favorite song off of the last one, which is arguably closest to AFP. I'm sure I'll enjoy the new one a lot but I don't think it'll compare ultimately.

he doesn't practice as much as nils cline.

lmao what the heck

this kind of rules though

i still hate nils cline

oh, c'mon. he's awesome, especially when deployed as the secret-weapon in someone's pop or rock act (e.g., wilco and, on their last album, the equally-awesome tinariwen).

I don't think it was intended as a personal attack, rather just a (misspelled) lyrical reference.

i can play circles around jay farrar

I don't know, I think this is his best album by a distance. Songwriting is just incredible. So much detail to get lost in. Anyone know how much of his writing is based on actual people vs. invented characters?

this article makes it sound like a lot of it comes from actual people

It's a bit inconsistent but some of it is utterly devastating (perhaps helped along by a hard-going week at work and a bottle of red). Found the bit about 4ad's Ivo strangely emotional for some reason.

Man, brothers just tears my heart out

Ian Cohen forcing me to order that vinyl (whenever it becomes available) even more promptly. That stuff sells out quick enough as it is.

In case you don't know what I mean: http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18860-sun-kil-moon-benji/

solid lol, from the interview

I can see how some of these incidents would sound odd, to say, a British journalist, or someone who is very young, or sheltered...

awesome

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Sunday, March 23, 2008 7:02 PM (5 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

y'mean the new one, or just in general?

― dell, Sunday, March 23, 2008 8:18 PM (5 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i meant in general

Still true.

this is good but perils from the sea was much more in my wheelhouse songwriting-wise so it feels a bit of a comedown from that

Have you checked out the Kozelek/Desertshore album?

yeah that one's solid too, dude's on a roll lately

'i watched the film the song remains the same' is the highlight so far

lyrics on this are as good as the pfork review etc insist but he's given up on writing vocal melodies half the time which irks me a bit since that was a strength of April and last year's records

this got a 9.2 omg

i dunno. i like kozelek a lot, and a guitar album about the sadness, desperation, regrets, and dignity of aging seems tailor-made for me. but i have a hard time imagining this is better than ghosts of the great highway, and that's after hearing about three or four songs from benji.

^ could not be more otm

like i came here to basically post what you did almost word for word, except insert "one or two" for "three or four"

Who said it's better than Ghosts?

its not better than his past successes, no, but it's also kind of evading comparison by doing something pretty different. his lyrics are more prose than poetry now and he doesn't really aim for catharsis

Who said it's better than Ghosts?

p4k review strongly implied it (and may have actually said it)

Who gives a fuck about pitchfork reviews?

http://i.imgur.com/ds80lOC.png?1?9390

literally no one good point

wait you're saying that pitchforkmedia.com's numerical score isn't an objective and universal indicator of quality?

dammit.

yeah i meant it as yet another criticism about the phenomena known as people/hipsters still fascinated by an album getting a high score from Ian Cohen or whoever from pitchfork.

no offense, Daniel, i know you are not one pf them.

Who gives a fuck about pitchfork reviews?

― nostormo, Monday, February 3, 2014 4:47 PM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

insound.com does.

I don't care what they give it. I linked it because it means higher sales from what I've seen.

still blown away pfork linked to his yes cover

http://www.dustedmagazine.com/features/836

"A journalist recently compared my playing to Steve Howe’s. It’s taken 15 years for that to happen."

it's the sound of his newer stuff, more than the lyrics (but that, too), that makes me say ghosts of the great highway is better (from what i've heard so far). ghosts has this massive, hypnotizing wall of sound, and a menacing, dangerous undercurrent. the newer stuff -- while very good, don't get me wrong -- sounds smaller, less ambitious, intentionally more slight, and the focus on mundane, everyday subjects in the lyrics reinforces the idea that the songs are smaller. to be fair, that's largely me focusing on the last album, which had some high-points, but sounded really awkward to me at times. maybe it was a transitional album, leading to benji. i'm still excited to hear new kozelek, and this album in particular.

hard to imagine anything will ever equal this song, tho:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKRA7weVyLs

Sorry that
I could never love you back
I could never care enough
In these last days

__________________________

Can't count to
All the lovers I've burned through
So why do I still burn for you
I cannot say

my god, those lyrics still kill.

All true. Though I think the delivery and phrasing is what makes it seem more powerful lyrically. Themes of death should be more crushing but the compositions and conversational approach does make it feel much smaller.

I might suggest that part of the idea is that death IS small, which is one of the reasons it's frightening and devastating. It's here all the time, a bit of a paradox b/c its omnipresence both makes it mundane and possibly, when you think about that, more disturbing. Death is small because we're all small, here one moment and gone the next.

that's interesting, and there's a lot of truth to it. i'm going to think about that when i begin listening to this album.

I'm struggling to think of another rock album in which a comparable number of specific biographical details and banalities are included. You get an incredibly comprehensive picture of who Kozelek is and what he cares about. (I realize that many will not find this notion endearing or interesting.)

I still prefer Perils From the Sea, though.

The idea that *this one* might be his late-career breakout is kind of hilarious, actually. It's a pretty strange album.

It's a pretty strange album.

i've only sampled part of it, but i bet this is right.

I can live with the sky falling out from above
I can live with your scorn, your sourness, your smug
I can live growing old alone if push comes to shove
But I can't live without my mother's love

I can live flying 'round at an impossible pace
I can live with the bad ettiquette that's falling on this place
I can live with anything you've got to throw in my face
But I can't live without my mother's embrace

My mother is seventy five
She's the closest friend I have in my life
Take her from me I'll break down and bawl
And wither away like old leaves in the fall

You can be cruel all you want talk bad on my brothers
Shoot me full of holes and I won't by bothered
Judge me for my ways and my slew of my ex-lovers
But don't ever dare say a bad word 'bout my mother.

When she's gone I'll miss her how slowly she walks
Playing scrabble with the chimes of the grandfather clock
I'll even miss the times that we fought
But mostly I'll miss being able to call her and talk.

I can live without watching the classical fights
I can live without a lover beside me at night
I can live without what you might call a charmed
But I can't live without my mother providing her light

My mother is seventy five
One day she won't be here to hear me cry
When the day comes for her to let go
I'll die off like a lemon tree in the snow
When the day comes for her to leave
I won't have the courage to sort through her things
With my sisters and all our memories
I cannot bear all the pain it will bring.

interesting in its hyper-confessional nature. when it's good, it has the power of neil young's best, most bracing, most direct lyrics.

gonna ruin somebody's day by saying this but when kozelek gets to near-rapping he sounds like the dude from Everclear

you have dishonored the name of "kozelek."

a lyric snippet out of this (otherwise edgy, interesting) richard ramirez song illustrates the highs-and-lows of kozelek's lyrics:

i don't like this gettin' older stuff
having to pee 50 times a day is bad enough
got a nagging prostate and i gotta bad back
when i fuck too much i feel like i'm gonna have a heart attack

so, the overall theme about the scariness and dignity of aging is a good focus for a record, and an artist. and a lot of times, kozelek nails that feeling perfectly. but the laundry-list of ailments feels a little artless and kvetch-y. and trying to squeeze in the extra words in the last line ("i'mgonnahaveaheartattack") makes it awkward.

to some extent, this is over-complaining. the just out-of-sync vocal harmonies and the dark, heavy-sounding guitar lines give the song an evil vibe. and that, i love.

at 53 richard ramirez died; but in 83, he was very much alive
he was the scariest killer in the land
had a pentagram in the center of his hand

kozelek's songs sometimes drip blood, which is a good thing.

gonna ruin somebody's day by saying this but when kozelek gets to near-rapping he sounds like the dude from Everclear

― da croupier, Monday, February 3, 2014 10:08 PM (20 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol this is pretty otm

Idk what’s with that falsetto voice he used to do. He doesn’t realize how much it sounds like that or a cat. Like you might think he’s doing a silly muppet voice on purpose but it appears he was always dead serious.

It works for me.

I'm not necessarily always put off by it, it's just so odd to me because if anyone else did it faithfully they'd sound like they're making fun of it.

But his singing voice was always weird. Especially by the time he got to the SKM phase, his voice sounds perpetually like he's got a jawbreaker in his cheek when he sings/talks. Or like he's extremely congested? I don't know; it's clearly outside of his control. It could be that it was less of a thing in the earlier RHP days because at that time his style was to really enunciate everything. I probably wrote this exact post at some point upthread.

I'm just glad to have opened this thread and not found that he has said/done something stupid.

Is he on social media?

No, thank christ

counterpoint: if he was on social media he'd have probably put all his bullshit there instead

he doesn't write songs anymore he writes feeds

"thanks but i would've preferred this with no music and as a twitter thread"

"Funhouse" is just so gutting

I'm just glad to have opened this thread and not found that he has said/done something stupid.

― djh, Saturday, February 9, 2019 5:57 PM (two weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^ otm

Early demo "The Bridge" sounds so much like "Cemetery Gates" by Smiths. I've read that Kozelek really didn't know much alternative/college rock back then but maybe the other members did.

I've been playing "Carry Me, Ohio" from "Ghosts of the Great Highway" on Youtube a lot recently. Sort of amazed that I don't own it. I must have been in a really bad mood (or listening to Kompakt) the year it was released.

there's a good alt version on the reissue bonus disc