sun kil moon?

more songs about your cat

He has a knack for punctuating his new, more relaxed style with really devastating lines and songs here and there - or merging the style with super depressing vignettes (see Perils From the Sea).

Overall, I agree with monotony but I do enjoy this style too.

But yeah, it's like he became so fascinated with the serious guitar virtuoso/Andres Segovia and intricate/delicate melody approach on Admiral Fell Promises that he burnt himself out and has been doing something with an opposite vibe and approach since then.

And while I do enjoy this stuff so much (and it is often WAY more captivating live) either way, when I come back to AFP I'm knocked off my feet in comparison.

Yup, this is pretty far from the stunning brilliance of the first Sun Kil Moon album. Props for following his muse and all...

what is wrong with yall this shit owns

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.

pic.twitter.com/CsOOGMopiz

— Ryley walker (@ryleywalker) November 12, 2018

the 'Fork finally gives up, a couple releases after most of the rest of us:

Kozelek isn’t the only songwriter who has had success with this mode of exhibitionist expression, of course, where the tiniest detail or circumstance plucked from day-to-day activity can offer an unexpected insight about life, loss, or emotion at large. After the death of his wife, Geneviève Castrée, Phil Elverum turned the act of taking out the day’s garbage into a moment of quiet desolation—and a jolting reminder as to why he had to keep going. Last year, Julie Byrne used the image of crossing the western United States to express a core of existential restlessness. Vivid songwriting, whether hip-hop or country, can hinge on these lived-in details. But during This Is My Dinner, Kozelek treats his songs like status updates on a Facebook account he again tells us he does not have. You often hear about bands leaving room for the singer, building up the lyrics rather than blocking them out. In this case, you wish that Kozelek had left any space at all for what sounds like a subtle, sophisticated backing crew, anchored by the expressive drumming of the Dirty Three’s Jim White. But, no: This is about Kozelek.

Recent themes return—Kozelek’s travels of Portugal and Norway, his anxiety over mass shootings, his subservience to his moods, how he understands pain better than the rest of us, his issues with his dad, how much meaning he extracts from boxers. What’s different here, though, is just how much we learn about Kozelek’s former virility and how losing it seems more bitter than sweet. He tells us about the time a promoter called him indie rock’s Wilt Chamberlain, the basketball star who claims to have slept with 20,000 women. He tries to dazzle with bygone tales of all the ménages à trois he’s had in Copenhagen and how he just doesn’t need them anymore. He vividly recounts escaping down frigid Oslo streets after a fan’s boyfriend caught her giving him a handjob and sucking his thumb. “When you’re in your 20s, in my opinion, nothing should be off limits,” Kozelek, 51, sings. Listening to This Is My Dinner is like going to a 25-year-high-school reunion and sitting beside the sad, divorced, and bloated former jock who tells you a dozen times about his game-winning touchdown at homecoming, then winks every time a pretty classmate walks by.

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sun-kil-moon-this-is-my-dinner/

haha, nice one

Really liking the demos/live disc of Red House Painters - Retrospective. "Waterkill" is great and I'll have to listen to other demos on youtube to see if they should have included any other unreleased songs.

Hope I find another band that either equals or tops pre-Ocean Beach RHP for this kind of sad music.

A+ seagull singing on live version of "Mistress".

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