Review: Benji by Sun Kil Moon

I’ve spent the last few months listening to the Sun Kil Moon song, “Richard Ramirez Died Today of Natural Causes”, borderline obsessively. No, not “borderline”. Obsessively. Needing to hear it at odd moments. Its dark themes, its braiding of the historical and cultural with the personal, its edgy circling fingerpicked motif, the queasy guitar lurches and clattering drums of its outro, its spoken-sung half-rhymed couplets, its frantic backing vocals. It got under my skin.

The song has released its hold, a little, in the last week or so, since the release of Benji, the new Sun Kil Moon album. “Richard Ramirez” is the dark keystone of the record, but the whole is an intense and compelling work. The song loosened its grip partly because the context humanizes it a little, and situates it in a network of correspondences that give it greater meaning. But mostly because I now have ten other Sun Kil Moon songs to obsess over.

Ohio songwriter Mark Kozelek has been releasing records for over 20 years, first with Red House Painters, and latterly as Sun Kil Moon. Few US indie bands of the 1990s made enough noise to be heard over the racket of Brit Pop in the UK, and Red House Painters weren’t one of them. They have some loud moments, but the prevailing mood is subdued. Their gauzy and lovelorn folkgaze stands up well. But under the blur and the ponderous pace, the songs are relatively conventional. And Kozelek’s confessional lyrics of the era strive just a little too hard for a poetic allusiveness.

A friend has counted 176 deaths, two anticipated and one failed suicide on the record. It takes in serial killings, shootings of innocents, two tragic deaths in the Kozelek family from exploding aerosol cans, a mercy killing, celebrity deaths

I came to Kozelek’s songwriting late, with the first of his records under the Sun Kil Moon moniker, 2003’s Ghosts of the Great Highway. It fitted well with the alt-country boom of that time, but it’s a stranger record than that suggests. It doesn’t draw its themes from folk culture sources. Instead, its centrepiece songs tell stories of pugilists dead in their prime. And those songs with more personal lyrics resist interpretation: the beautiful, sad “Carry Me Ohio” (the first Sun Kil Moon song I ever heard, via an Uncut magazine cover-mounted CD) allows fleeting impressions only; and “Glenn Tipton” is derailed at the beginning by a catalogue of boxers, Judas Priest guitarists, and balladeers, and at the end by a strange shift into serial killer imagery. The music is just as off-kilter: “Salavador Sanchez” takes a Crazy Horse riff, but turns it into a bludgeoning drone; the proggy “Duk Koo Kim” breaks down into a mass of mandolins and sparse finger picking, but begins with shoegaze shimmer and psych guitar.

Since Ghosts of the Great Highway, Kozelek has continued to hollow out American songcraft in increasingly sophisticated ways, not all successful, but all compelling. On the underrated Tiny Cities, he stripped a clutch of Modest Mouse songs of their urgency, but gave them an almost unbearable poignancy.  Then, on April, he played around with song structures, twisting them into odd shapes. On “Tonight the Sky”, just at the moment when a ragged guitar solo should kick in over the churning CSN&Y riff, there is, instead, a few mournful licks, followed by one stuttering note held far longer than makes any sense. The downbeat nylon string and flamenco solos of April’s final song, “Blue Orchids”, was developed by Kozelek on the next album, Admiral Fell Promises, into a new kind of songwriting, further removed from the American folk idiom. That album’s lyrics were more personal, more reflective. This directness was taken further on Among the Leaves, a record that dwells on Kozelek’s experiences of touring, and, in “Track Number 8”, has what amounts almost to a meta joke about the process of putting together an album. The record also features some of the most powerful melodies of Kozelek’s career. At times, the bitching about the indignities of being a middle-aged travelling musician grow wearisome, but on the record’s highlight, “Elaine”, a song about an ex and her crack addiction, Kozelek’s craft mixes an intoxicating brew.

It’s only just over 10 years since I heard “Carry Me Ohio” on that Uncut CD, but it feels like a lot longer, and not just because the whole idea of a CD on the cover of a magazine now sounds absurdly arcane – as lost to the past as the notion, say, of a Blackwoods Magazine lithograph insert – but because, looking back, it feels like Kozelek’s music has soundtracked much of my life. Those songs have been with me at important times. But none of it has elicited the visceral reaction Benji does.

With Sun Kil Moon’s new record, all the different elements of Kozelek’s songwriting seem to have coalesced. There are no loud moments on the record, no Crazy Horse numbers, no shoegaze, in fact, no electric guitars at all, but the music is some of the most vivid and gripping he’s ever recorded. It has an incredible immediacy; Kozelek has talked about how he tries to get songs on tape soon after they’re written so as to record them fresh, and that shows here more than ever before. And the production reveals all the textures and timbres of the instruments used; every strum, pick, xylophone strike, and Rhodes tone is clear and sharp.

It feels as if that hollowing out of the American song tradition that Kozelek has been attempting his whole career has here been achieved. The popular music canon is present, but in distorted form. The songs cover the gamut of sounds, from the driving blues of “Richard Ramirez” and “Pray for Newtown”, to the gentle fingerpicked folk of “Micheline”, from the lovelorn strumming of “Dogs”, to the upbeat bluesrock of “I Love My Dad”, and even to shades of MOR with the flamenco flourishes and soft rock sax of “Ben’s My Friend”. But all these styles are approached in an unconventional way. Kozelek also takes some of his beloved 1970s classic rock influences, and puts them through a very personal filter. The use of the Rhodes piano recalls the intro to Led Zeppelin’s “No Quarter”, which is referenced in “I Watched the Film ‘The Song Remains the Same’”, but its bright sound on “Jim Wise” is utterly different from the lugubrious John Paul Jones melody. The folk troubadour tradition can also be heard on the record, but treated with great irreverence.

Not all of the music is successful. That soft rock sax is a little grating, and strangely unoriginal for Kozelek, given the indie reclamation of 1980s sounds over the last few years. And I sometimes yearn for a little less polish, more fret buzz, fingers scraping on the strings, some duff notes that would heighten the powerful immediacy. But the lyrics are almost flawless. Kozelek’s been writing about his personal life his whole career, but his words have been mostly impressionistic, and his vocals often buried, hard to make out. But on Benji every word is stark and clear. It is nakedly personal, the poetry stripped away. In a recent interview Kozelek discussed this: “I suppose I’ve run out of metaphors,” he explained. “For the most part this record is as real as a bad car accident.”

This is bleak stuff in the main. A friend has counted 176 deaths, two anticipated and one failed suicide on the record. It takes in serial killings, shootings of innocents, two tragic deaths in the Kozelek family from exploding aerosol cans, a mercy killing, celebrity deaths, and, perhaps saddest of all, somehow, a friend of Kozelek’s who just loved to play his guitar, but whose odd way of fretting bar chords put a strain on the nerves of his hand, caused a stroke and hastened his death. Then there’s Kozelek jilting and being jilted, and anxieties about mortality, all delivered in couplets, their rhymes often forced, over and over.

The melancholy on Benji isn’t moping or inturned. It’s profound, the profound kind of melancholy that comes from contemplating the world and one’s place in it

It should be draining and miserable. But it’s not. The melodies lift it. And there are moments where the mood is much lighter, lyrics that tell of the joy of music, the love of parents, the pleasure of friendships, even a joke – a continuation of Kozelek’s baiting of avant-guitarist, Nils Cline; a sarcastic version of a Cline solo. And those couplets, that should be dirgeful somehow aren’t; Kozelek’s phrasing is perfect, they combine the feel of natural speech with the propulsive rhythm of song.

The melancholy on Benji isn’t moping or inturned. It’s profound, the profound kind of melancholy that comes from contemplating the world and one’s place in it, a melancholy that’s not miserable, not even really sad.

An intricate web of connections holds the songs together. A death in the family described in “Richard Ramirez”, turns out to be that of Kozelek’s second cousin, whose tragic story is told in “Carissa”. Kozelek’s family and friends are recurring characters. Benji breaks down the wall between singer and listener. It feels like the creation of a whole complete world for the listener to relate to. The album becomes a meditation on the interconnectedness of things, on memory, on the way the historical and the personal become conflated, mixed up in the mind.

We live in nostalgia-saturated times, in which the past returns stripped of all meaning, of all emotional charge, of all its “pastness”, to circulate aimless and void. The melancholy of this record is precisely the opposite of that kind of nostalgia: through it the past remains past, rich with significance, moving, connected with our lives.

In his 1923 manifesto, Spring and All, William Carlos Williams exhorts poets to revitalise language so it does not merely describe the world, plagiarise nature, but recreates it anew in the imagination. Such a work, Williams writes, “gives the feeling of completion by revealing the oneness of experience; it rouses rather than stupefies the intelligence by demonstrating the importance of personality, by showing the individual, depressed before it, that his life is valuable – when completed by the imagination. And then only.”

By returning to the old themes of time and memory, Kozelek tries to heal his and our fractured selves. His is a melancholy to give us pause. C

 

Sunkilmoon.com
Timothy Jarvis is a writer and critic with an interest in the antic and the weird