a r t i s t : Sun Kil Moon
t i t l e : April
d a t e : 2008
l a b e l : Caldo Verde
c a t : CV006
s o u r c e : CDDA
g e n r e : Indie
r l s. d a t e : Mar/2008
t r a c k s : 15
b i t r a t e : VBRkbps
s i z e : 120,1 MB
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To many, 2003's Ghosts Of The Great Highway is one of the
great singer-songwriter albums of our time, extending Mark
Kozelek's legacy beyond his Red House Painters heyday. Five
years on from the original release of that album, April is a
natural successor, marking the first batch of entirely new
material from Kozelek since then. It's by no means an easily
digested, concise piece of work, however. The total running
time exceeds the seventy-minute mark, with many songs
gravitating around ten-minute durations, as is the case with
opener 'Lost Verses', which shifts between lightly strummed,
pastoral guitar figures supported by understated string
section sweeps and an ensemble of voices, only to shift into a
crunching, soft-rocking coda that segues into the Zuma-era
Neil Young-isms of 'The Light'. Attentive followers of the
Mark Kozelek catalogue will already have some degree of
familiarity with a couple of the songs here: both 'Unlit
Hallway' and 'Moorestown' were showcased on the 2006 live
album "Little Drummer Boy". 'Moorestown' in particular sounds
like a miniature classic in the making. It's one of the
shorter pieces on April, but nonetheless manages to get its
point across in under five minutes, driven by glistening,
clean electric arpeggios straight out of the Dave Pajo book of
guitar techniques. The maudlin romanticism of the piece calls
upon those familiar stomping grounds for Kozelek: the pull of
memory and places left behind. "I cannot bear to wonder now/If
the cascading soft lights/Are glowing for us in Moorestown".
If any evidence were required to support Kozelek's standing
among his peers, backing vocals from Will Oldham and Death Cab
For Cutie's Ben Gibbard feature on the album, but regardless
of who's standing next to him, Kozelek always sounds like he's
very much alone. It's that particularly intense moroseness
that makes him so captivating as a writer and a singer; you
never get the sense that his words are empty, and a profound
sense of sadness looms over these recordings. From a
listener's point of view this album is an intimidating,
unwieldy prospect, but April confronts you with exceptional,
deeply involving material throughout, and is, in all honesty,
quite astonishing.
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cd1
01-Lost Verses [09:43]
02-The Light [07:50]
03-Lucky Man [05:47]
04-Unlit Hallway [04:19]
05-Heron Blue [07:38]
06-Moorestown [04:41]
07-Harper Road [03:56]
08-Tonight the Sky [10:21]
09-Like the River [04:09]
10-Tonight in Bilbao [09:28]
11-Blue Orchids [05:57]
cd2
01-Tonight in Bilboa - Alt Version [09:43]
02-The Light - Alt Version [06:02]
03-Like the River - Alt Version [03:04]
04-Tonight the Sky - Alt Version [07:36]
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