Don’t make the same mistake as me with the new Sun Kil Moon record, April. The first 2 times I tried listening to it were in the car on my drive home from work. A 45 minute battle along the Belt Parkway with half the cars in Queens/Brooklyn trying to make your brain explode is not the way to take in Mark Kozelek’s gentle, swirling hymns. The obvious beauty of these songs was completely lost on me, and for the past few weeks I‘ve been ignoring them. Until today. Sitting here in the early-morning hours trying to shake off one of those perfect night sleeps when you don’t have to get up for work is a much better setting to hear an album that, more than most, is not meant to be heard under all conditions.Those first 2 listens made me pretty vehement in my early negative opinion, but I‘ve since come around. April may not be quite the record Ghosts of the Great Highway was, but if you liked that record (and chances are if you did, you really did) then April is a must hear. It’s 11 more songs that have all the same qualities that made Ghosts such a pleasant surprise and a modern Americana classic - carefully plucked acoustics and piano; winding Crazy Horse-grooves; Kozelek’s sturdy, reassuring voice; and a hazy, sustained mood running from start to finish. The melodies again take time to settle in and show their faces, but once they do you’ll be helpless to them. Just make sure you aren’t driving in traffic when you first listen.
MP3 :: Moorestown
(from April. Buy here)
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1 comment:
I'm loving April, though I agree that it's the kind of album that demands you come to it on its own terms. I've found oddly that it works well as a soundtrack to the work day. You wouldn't guess but it has a real repeatability factor going for it. I can listen to it all day and manage to not get bummed out even!
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