Sun Kil Moon - Poems for a Blue Guitar

While waiting for the record label issues that delayed the release of Old Ramon, the latest work by the Red House Painters, by years, Mark Kozelek released two solo works, the EP Rock'n Roll Singer and What's Next To The Moon, both centered on rarefied acoustic versions of AC/DC songs, flanked on the first record by a trio of original tracks and a cover of John Denver. These early works (later reissued together as a double vinyl titled If You Want Blood) are mostly a divertissement for his fans, though they do include the gorgeous ballad "Find Me, Ruben Olivares", which deserves a mention.

The second phase of Kozelek's career effectively begins with Ghosts Of The Great Highway, and from the very first notes it's clear that there's actually no real break between the music of the Red House Painters and that of Sun Kil Moon.

Besides the old band's former drummer, Anthony Koutsos, Kozelek is now joined by Tim Mooney of American Music Club and Geoff Stanfield of Black Lab. Never before has Mark Kozelek's voice seemed so intent on following the same path carved out by Neil Young on the sands of "On The Beach", chasing after its falsettos and its fragile strength. And when the rough, hypnotic electric guitar of "Salvador Sanchez" starts to mark out the rhythm, it's Crazy Horse reincarnated at the edges of the Great Highway, only for the album to close by revisiting the same song in acoustic form, under the title "Pancho Villa".

The epic of boxing is an obsession that keeps creeping in between the tracks of Ghosts Of The Great Highway; just listen to the lines that open the album to be instantly struck by a dazzling image: "Cassius Clay was hit more than Sonny Liston/ some like K.K. Downing more than Glenn Tipton". Who else could have compared the clash between two boxers who symbolized an era to the rivalry between the two guitarists of Judas Priest? And then there's Salvador Sanchez, the Mexican champion who died at just twenty-three in a car accident, alongside Filipino boxer Pancho Villa and Korean fighter Duk Koo Kim, tragically killed in the ring after a bout with Ray Mancini (the "Boom Boom Mancini" sung about by Warren Zevon). No, Sun Kil Moon's debut cannot simply be dismissed as a rehash of the well-established musical formula of Red House Painters.

Granted, it's in the nuances that the distinctive traits of Mark Kozelek's new path must be sought, but then again, his music has always been built on hinted-at chiaroscuro, following the lesson of Mark Eitzel. So within the relative compactness of the songs on Ghosts Of The Great Highway, one can detect a desire for a more direct expressiveness than in the past, while the long, slowed-down "Duk Koo Kim" lets a final coda pour out, punctuated by xylophone and the embroidery of a Portuguese guitar. The delicate mariachi touches of the instrumental "Si, Paloma" thus manage to coexist quite comfortably with the brazen Lou Reed-esque riff of "Lily And Parrots", in which, for once, Kozelek simply seems to want to play with a smile on his face.

But while some tracks on the record risk slipping too easily into monotony, it's when the understated strings of the San Francisco Conservatory counterpoint Kozelek's voice that Sun Kil Moon's debut finds its way to its deepest dimension, rising with "Last Tide", "Pancho Villa" and above all the exquisite "Gentle Moon" to a lightness easily likened to certain dreams of Nick Drake.

Tiny Cities is once again a covers album, this time dedicated to the repertoire of another standout band of the '90s, Modest Mouse. Few words are needed to describe it. The intro of "Exit Does Not Exist" alone is enough to make clear that it delivers exactly what one would expect. More than a song (or a sketch of one), what we find is the description of a ghost ship, a spectral setting for a skeletal composition, with Kozelek's voice reigning low, now evidently aged to the point of brushing against a lament, yet still gorgeous, enchanting, profound. The signs are fairly promising: "Tiny Cities Made Of Ashes" is a whispered slow number, built on the classic guitar progressions, a few piano notes and an imperceptible breath of violin coloring an atmosphere bordering on the short story. The prayer-like "Neverending Math Equation", heartfelt despite its low register, marked by drum hits with a vaguely country feel; and "Space Travel Is Boring", the howl of a werewolf, delivered in an utterly subdued, desolate tone drowned in violin accompaniment, confirm these expectations, proving to be fine reinterpretations.

The trouble with Tiny Cities is that the record essentially ends there, since what follows is mostly unsuccessful sketches. The tenderness of the despondent progressions of "Dramamine" fizzles out into an anonymous passage at high risk of tedium; "Jesus Christ Was An Only Child" tries its hand at full-blown romanticism but comes off as a bluff; "Grey Ice Water" stays undecided throughout between grand ballad and folk number, never quite convincing on either front. The dark breath of "Convenient Parking", delivered over Fahey-style guitar work, only surprises with its impact on first listen, then is too easily forgotten.

Only a few melodic flourishes save the day, like the one that shakes up the otherwise uninspired serenade of "Four Fingered Fisherman", which perfectly captures how this turns out to be, above all, an album of regrets; or the delicacy with which certain passages are presented, such as the terminal melancholy of "Ocean Breathless Salty".

Sun Kil Moon barely exist on this record; they're really just a name masking the three accompanying notes behind Kozelek's solo turn, as he takes other people's melodies as a springboard to spend the whole album wallowing in himself.

Starting with Tiny Cities, the Californian songwriter begins releasing his own work independently, founding the Caldo Verde label: from this point on, the number of records released under his own name surges, especially when it comes to live albums; they inevitably tend to resemble each other a great deal, yet this doesn't seem to bother fans in the least, and physical copies of each release systematically sell out, becoming collectors' prey. Standing out in this sizeable live discography is the double album Little Drummer Boy, featuring splendid acoustic versions of some Painters classics such as "Bubble", "Down Colorful Hill", "Katy Song" and "Mistress".

Another masterpiece comes out in 2008: clocking in at over seventy minutes, April is an imposing record, surprisingly complex and deep for an artist who is certainly no newcomer, and who conventional wisdom would have wearily coasting along, occasionally offering nostalgic flashes of his class, good only for keeping alive the memory of past glory.

That this is, fortunately, not the case for Kozelek is clear from the nearly ten minutes of the opening "Lost Verses", which seems determined to draw a firm line in the sand, marking an unprecedented fresh start, even while remaining fully rooted in the familiar groove of sepia-toned songwriting, once again animated by the sweet nostalgia of distant memories and crowned by a voice as unmistakable and expressive as few others, now made even deeper and more velvety by the passing years.

In the songs on April, obviously, one can hardly expect to find the youthful torment of the days of Down Colorful Hill, but it must be noted how Kozelek's voice is still able to fill the stories he tells with poetry and to translate brief, literary-flavored tales into music, often turning them into long songs that are nonetheless perfectly mastered in their gradual unfolding of gentle arpeggios and mournful electric crescendos.

Indeed, two distinct instrumental and compositional souls coexist within the album, expressed on one hand by the contrast between intense acoustic tracks and more electrically bluesy ones, and on the other between classic, concise ballads and elaborate hymn-like pieces, whose length is never tedious, since it is simply functional to whatever narrative needs arise each time.

This manifold intersection of elements and writing styles thus produces, at once, the lengthy electric elegy "Tonight The Sky" and the intimate prose of "Tonight In Bilbao", the perfect balance between harsh sonic backdrop and soft melodies on "The Light", and the masterful acoustic brushstrokes of "Lucky Man", a song with a more pronounced folk imprint that, alongside the following "Unlit Hallway", can already be counted among the finest songs ever penned by the Californian songwriter.

For the sake of completeness, it should be added that artists of the caliber of Bonnie "Prince" Billy and Ben Gibbard contribute to the album, and that a further strength of April lies in the refinement of its melodies and arrangements, always restrained and measured, making clear that we are in the presence of a varied work deeply marked by Mark Kozelek's deeply personal touch, undoubtedly reinvigorated in his inspiration by the full five years separating this album from his previous original work.

From the same year comes The Finally Ep, which gathers various covers already released on other compilations, including "Lazy", a (tongue-in-cheek?) acoustic reworking of the minimalist gem by Low.

The third original album under the Sun Kil Moon name, Admiral Fell Promises, is an extremely intimate and personal record, relying solely on the elements of his unmistakable voice and the nylon strings of a brand-new blue guitar, stroked or plucked with a discreet, crystalline, emotional picking style tinged with recurring Latin inflections.

No more electric excursions, then, nor the shifting, colourful arrangements that had marked the previous April, but just an hour of descriptions and dark confessions of Mark Kozelek's fragile sensibility, never so intimate and stripped-down as here.

What comes through in the stories and reflections summed up in often torrential lyrics is a solitary, nostalgic Kozelek, with a particular focus on narrating the places where his life and art unfold. The exteriors are city corners, perspectives of grey clouds and bare branches, glimpses of blue sea over which seagulls fly; the interiors are above all those of the soul, snapshots taken from the artist's rooms and from his creative solitude. And so a sensitive heart gives itself over to the chords of his spanish guitar to soothe "⟦Q1⟧" ("Half Moon Bay"), going so far as to seek in his chosen instrument the only relief from old wounds and a new enemy, time passing relentlessly by: "⟦Q2⟧" ("Church Of The Pines").

And yet, despite the mood and the themes, Admiral Fell Promises is not, in the end, such a dark and hopeless work: witness the warmth that seeps from the nylon strings, which at times arch into graceful bolero shapes, and the frequent asynchronous interplay between the notes and the stories, set on a different but related plane, which gain all the more breathing room the more space they're given in tracks that stretch beyond the six- or seven-minute mark ("Third And Seneca", "Church Of The Pines" - among the album's finest moments, alongside the more concise "Sam Wong Hotel" and "Australian Winter").

A record whose content is so personal it comes across as a kind of self-analysis diary, Admiral Fell Promises may well run into communicative limits due to the unchanging nature of its formula and its rather monochromatic feel; and yet it cannot help but be admired for the artist's willingness to lay himself bare, both in terms of sensitivity and sound.

After the release of Admiral Fell Promises, Kozelek kept himself very busy: he produced several albums by other artists on his label Caldo Verde, sang on the latest Desertshore record alongside ex-Red House Painters member Phil Carney, and played countless shows around the world, even taking centre stage in the documentary "On Tour" by his Oscar-winning friend Cameron Crowe. This prolific streak gave birth to Among The Leaves, to date perhaps his most accessible album.

That something has changed in Kozelek compared to the past is already clear from the cover, dominated by a cold, clinical piece of text in complete contrast to the dark, nostalgic imagery that had defined his earlier work. Even the song titles seem to have been tossed off without much planning ("Track Number 8", "I Know It's Pathetic But That Was The Greatest Night Of My Life"); and that sense of a missing overall vision carries through the whole listen, a long record full of filler.

On the strictly musical side there isn't much to note, except that the experiment of Admiral Fell Promises, where the arrangements were pared down to just voice and classical guitar, has been set aside: brushed drums make a comeback ("The Moderately Talented Yet Not So Attractive Middle Aged Man", "The Winery"), along with choral backing and the occasional electric counterpoint ("King Fish"). But the Californian remains one of the greatest songwriters of our time, and songs like the title track, "Sunshine In Chicago" or the dark dirge "That Bird Has A Broken Wing" - all potential new classics - are there to prove it.

Standing well above the rest is "Uk Blues", an amusing account of various clichés the author runs into while touring, in which Mark displays an unexpectedly sharp comic verve (“Tried a few new songs/ They looked at me like what?/ Where’s Katy Song, Mistress/ Grace Cathederal Park?”, “Turned on the the TV/ There was rioting and stuff/ As If this city/ Isn’t depressing enough/ London London/ It’s all the rage/ If your favorite color is beige”, “Bristol Bristol/ Cobble stone streets/ People missing teeth”).

The final impression, though, is of a work that only half succeeds, one that would certainly have been better had it come out a few years later, after a more careful selection of tracks.

Benji pushes the oversharing tendency of recent years to its extreme consequences, this time set within the fully realised sonic flow of a remarkably strong set of songs. Stripped of all metaphor, the songwriter's words overwhelm the listener, relying exclusively on acoustic sounds.

From the very opening of "Carissa" the sound carries the melancholy of autobiographical memory, in the telling of the tragedy of a cousin who loses her life in a bizarre domestic accident. A moving ode to his mother, "I Can't Live Without My Mother's Love" is a gorgeous tribute to the woman, now seventy-five, whom the author cannot imagine outliving.

"Truck Driver", on the other hand, recalls the darkness of third-era Cohen, the one of "Songs Of Love And Hate", with plucked guitar accompanying a dark voice close to the nylon-stringed introspection of Admiral Fell Promises, here stripped of the contortions that used to weigh down its flow. The lament that opens "Dogs" is just as chilling, and the track's overall momentum is no less so: an obsessive, linear folk-rock with an arrangement that adds scattered touches with every new verse, with no chorus allowed to offer a breather.

In "Pray For Newtown" death is stripped of the ecstatic, distant quality found in other compositions and is instead shown in its most brutal guise, that of the massacres at Newtown, San Ysidro, Utøya. Wedged between one story and another of friends and relatives lost along the way, the juxtaposition of these tragedies reveals the intent not simply to voice one individual's reflections on absence and loss, but to tell the story of the tragedy faced by every man who finds himself reckoning with mortality.

Above everything else, though, stand two genuine masterpieces, to be added to an already extraordinary catalogue.

The first, “I Watched The Film The Song Remains The Same”, runs to ten minutes, but throughout its length it rests on an evocative power worthy of the best acoustic Neil Young. The pictorial fingerpicking and intimate storytelling are lit up by the melody's rise and by a few minimal choral openings that appear here and there. Kozelek draws on the memory of the famous Led Zeppelin film for a meditation on the melancholy that has accompanied him since childhood, moving through his own memories and offering thanks to Ivo Watts-Russell, who gave him a chance with 4AD now more than twenty years ago. A Fellini-esque ending, as if the singer wanted to gather close every person he's ever loved or simply met over the course of a lifetime.

The second, “Micheline”, we'd already known for a few months, but the magic hasn't faded one bit. The girl with a mild mental disability who used to run to find Mark at home and, when he left, “smiled as if Paul McCartney had just given her an autograph”; his friend Brett, who played guitar in a wholly idiosyncratic way; the grandmother, once again, and the sinuous tenderness with which Kozelek sings that “my grandma” grips the heart as much as the “Granny” of Vic Chesnutt. A place suspended between happiness and sadness, its spell sealed by a light drizzle of piano that can't help but move anyone who has heard and loved Here Comes A Regular.

Overall, a splendid work, destined to be remembered as yet another precious achievement from one of the greatest songwriters of the last twenty-five years.

Just one year later comes Universal Themes. What remains of this noise, of these ten-minute-long pieces where you can find a bit of everything (or an echo of it, at least), from epic-pastoral openings in the vein of Ghosts Of The Great Highway to the lofty arpeggios of Admiral Fell Promises, not forgetting the bare, depressed rap of Benji, is simply, and increasingly, Mark Kozelek himself: it feels like following him as he goes “gracefully to the bathroom to cry”, or as he leans on the balcony railing of his hotel room, until the impression is no longer that he's a lifelong friend, but that you actually are him. Not just an artist who becomes his own art, but also a listener who becomes part of it, less an illusory vertigo than an exasperated voyeurism.

This is what Kozelek's audience wants: to know where he's been this year (he recounts it several times, for instance, that he shot a few scenes for “Youth”), and he's understood this perfectly well, so the tracks on “Universal Themes” are even more claustrophobic and obsessive, long digressions into the aetiology of the soul in which the musical content runs dry fairly quickly.

But the exasperation of this self-referentiality is still precisely one of the secrets behind the new Sun Kil Moon's success, and so these traits from Benji are amplified in Universal Themes, the songwriting now practically just a backing track tossed out from his own prefabricated formulas, the vocal performances sloppy and pushed to extremes, the choices capricious and off-the-cuff.

Artistic expression as such seems, in short, secondary to Kozelek's shamanic image, by now dangerously close to being nothing more than a prophet of himself, and of everyone who feels like picking up the phone to hear him talk uninterrupted for hours, until his voice blurs into the noise of the world. Will this kind of collective hypnosis last?

Announced shortly after the release of Universal Themes, the collaboration with Justin K. Broadrick hit the shelves in January 2016, just six months after its predecessor. But even the Jesu / Sun Kil Moon pairing doesn't inspire anything different from Mark Kozelek's recent records: swollen torrents of memories and notes in a form we might as well now call rapping, increasingly for its own precision rather than for convention's sake. The hooded guitarist, for his part, mostly offers up his equally classic blasts in major keys, alternated with the low, massive frequencies of palm-muted riffs (never more epic than in the ecstatic doom of “Carondelet”). But equal space goes to the instruments Justin uses in his other projects, from the drum machine to trails of delayed clean guitar and synths. The lyrics once again make room for snapshots of life on tour around the world, between the Italian-Swiss experience on Sorrentino's film and an idle day off in Milan; the undeniable fucked-upness of an America battered by yet another massacre of innocents; a few (more tender than usual) words about his partner Caroline; two letters sent by fans who have followed Kozelek since the Red House Painters days; and, not least, a series of eulogies spanning Chris Squire of Yes, the son of Nick Cave, who died at just 15, and a few other acquaintances from his native Ohio. Broadrick's involvement comes across as a mere footnote within a discourse that otherwise proceeds undisturbed at its own pace and with its own metre, amid recurring themes and idiosyncrasies that are by now all too familiar. Here too, the implicit demand is to take sides: either with Mark or against him, America's most wanted, who in any case — we can be certain — will keep pressing on, unfazed, down the road of the most total and unconditional sincerity.

The first true double album that isn't simply an original record bundled with a bonus disc, Common As Light And Love Are Red Valleys Of Blood (2017) is the triumph of Kozelek's recent continuous, quasi-industrial outpouring method, over two hours of blurred, monotonous streams of consciousness on the present day. Of all the long free-form mechanisms whose workings only he, probably, understands, only “God Bless Ohio” (a rant about the troubles of his homeland) sticks to the stretched-out folk style that the Sun Kil Moon name had accustomed us to. The 11 minutes of “Philadelphia Cop” are a slack, drawling rap, its comic effect heightened by the most banal of piano figures and a little theatrical skit. Even more hip-hop, though broken up by passages of folktronica, is “The Highway Song”, a river of reflections on the highway, while new psychic obsessions surface across the 9 minutes of “Lone Star”, the 12 minutes of “Stranger Than Paradise”, and the 8 minutes of “Butch Lullaby”, manic streams of consciousness punctuated by alarming mood swings. The most affecting dramatic moment comes in “Chili Lemon Peanuts”, when Kozelek keeps confessing to himself over an impersonal acoustic signal, nearly fading away. Probably the best track, though, is the almost Nick Cave-like delivery of “Bergen To Trondheim”. An unintentional fusion of impressionism and expressionism that incidentally seems to invent a form of protest. Aside from the lighter, more ridiculous moments, listening truly requires an unconditional passion for who he is, his bored, capricious, self-centred nature as a naive observer of the present day.

The author's chaotic discography carries on, returning to wallpaper-like arpeggios and chords repeated ad nauseam before suddenly shifting key. In practice, it's his usual modus operandi, shrivelled, stylised and pushed to the extreme (and to exhaustion). You could say that Mark Kozelek (2018), again a double album, is in many ways the intimate counterpart to Common As Light And Love, but it's certainly another whim of the author. Here, reclaiming his own name mostly signals a pretext for venting, as before but even more so, without reins or criteria. Once again an opening track centred on his homeland, “This Is My Town”, works more than ever as a mission statement: rosaries of guitar harmonics and a vocal flow that's part streaked, part sung-modulated, part chatted, part muttered, and finally declaimed. Already at “only” seven minutes long, the song tends to wear itself out. Thankfully, restraint is also maintained on “Live In Chicago”, an acoustic riff with a touch of the madrigal about it, the rarefied, ghostly “Sublime”, with its continuous loop tuned like a harp, the zombie-trance recitation of “Good Nostalgia”, and “Young Riddick Bowe”, almost gospel were it not for the torrent of words drowning it. The low points, then, come from the longer pieces. On “The Banjo Song” (thirteen minutes), a strummed guitar ticking like a clock and a Neil Young-esque lament that also comes off as unintentionally comic, it's a struggle to find any songwriting talent left. The same goes for the nine minutes of “I Cried During Wall Street”, weighed down by tons of Kozelek's sentences and asides (even, at the close, the date and time the song was recorded). In the psychedelic, waltz-time chamomile of “The Mark Kozelek Museum” (ten minutes) the author's egotism simply overflows (there's even a tribute to Steve Howe on guitar, naturally underscored by a long-winded sung caption), as it does in the endless dedication of “My Love For You Is Undying” (twelve minutes), truly unbearable. On the whole, there's a non-sterile immediacy in the construction of the chord progressions, the product of the skill of a folk master of his calibre, a purity that nonetheless gets lost through sheer repetition, ending up obsessive rather than enrapturing. It's hard to see it as a collection of “Desolation Row”-type songs even if that often seems to be the intent; at best it's a musical diary, at worst a cross between a ridiculous self-absorbed folksinger's album, a captivating audiobook, and an excellent sleep aid. These rivers of words, anecdotes and impressions are the equivalent of pedantic footnotes to the fine novel that was Red House Painters.

With Welcome To Sparks, Nevada (Caldo Verde, 2021) Kozelek offers up already-familiar harmonic shapes (“Morning Cherry”), revealing sloppy arrangements and lopsided vocals, barely tolerable especially in the Daniel Johnston-esque “The Johnny Cash Trailer”, alongside monotonous spoken-word exercises that push the limits of tolerability (“Welcome To Sparks”). The album was recorded between April and June 2020 between San Francisco and Duluth. Its coordinates are similar to those of the previous trio album with Ben Boye (Bonnie Prince Billy, Ryley Walker) and Jim White (Dirty Three, Xylouris White), “2” (Caldo Verde, 2017), on which the music turns out particularly colourless and at times inexplicably bloated in length (“William McGirt”, “Hugo”). What salvages the whole operation are the tracks with guest appearances, like the opening “Angela” with Mimi Parker of Low, the album's best track, which leaves you wishing for a whole album of duets.

Contributions by Raffaello Russo (“April”, “Admiral Fell Promises”), Gabriele Benzing (“Ghosts Of The Great Highway”), Ciro Frattini (“Tiny Cities”), Francesco Pandini (“Benji”), Lorenzo Righetto (“Universal Themes”), Michele Palozzo (“Jesu / Sun Kil Moon”), Michele Saran (“Common As Light And Love Are Red Valleys Of Blood”, “Mark Kozelek”), Maria Teresa Soldani (“Welcome To Sparks, Nevada”)

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google