Sun Kil Moon sings stories of tragedy in new album ‘Benji’

Hipster drivel: Mark McGuire’s ‘Along the Way’ draws on progressive-rock roots

Recently, I’ve realized that the albums I use in playlists for when I’m cranking out a paper have infiltrated the playlists I put on when I’m having sex. Yes, you can find those playlists on my Spotify account. Yes, you can borrow them whenever you want for whatever your reason, and yes, you can find Mark McGuire’s new album “Along the Way” on either one.
Beyond the carnality of my essays, the collegiality of my lovemaking and the banality of my playlist titles, Mark McGuire reveals a trend in electronic music in the post-dubstep world with his dichotomous sound—ambient yet visceral, and ethereal yet physical. Much like fellow producers like Burial, Nicolas Jaar and Jon Hopkins conjure sterile soundscapes only to fill them with life and feeling, Mark McGuire marries the hedony of Donna Summer disco to the austerity of Aphex Twin ambience.
Maybe that isn’t quite fair. After all, the first sound we hear on opening track, “Awakening,” is an acoustic guitar, hardly the staple of the electronic musician. But how does one even begin to define an electronic musician in 2014, 10years after all the rock kids sold their guitars to buy turntables? “Reflektor”—the de facto Arcade Fire-LCD Soundsystem collaboration last year might have finally rendered distinctions between genres like rock and electronic music irrelevant—if they’ve ever been relevant at all.

Hipster drivel: ‘Lost in the Dream’: best heard on the road

For me, there’s only one way to listen to Tom Petty, on the road. I was raised that way. Sure, Talking Heads or The Police soundtracked dinner and family game night, but when my Deadhead of a dad ushered me into the car, it was Tom Petty who’d serenade us all the way to soccer practice.
“Damn the Torpedoes,” “Full Moon Fever” and especially “Echo”—I knew those records inside and out. They were the type of album I always heard all the way through, as I stared out the window at the golden shade of streetlamps zipping by on the way home from New York City. My mother and sisters usually drifted off into their own golden slumbers, so it was just us boys: me, my dad and the Heartbreakers.
The experience of listening to music on a car stereo—whether from the tape deck or radio—has an immediacy that’s lost in the iPod age. I had no idea what the names of the songs were (ok, they weren’t hard to guess, this is don’t-bore-us-skip-to-the-chorus Petty after all), giving them an economy of ignorance, a preciousness out of fleetingness. Every now and then, I hear a song that instantly transports me back to 2:00 a.m. in the backseat of the old Goodrich-mobile on an anonymous interstate.
Funnily enough, this year has brought a return of the long drive anthem. Two o’ clock in the morning on an anonymous interstate is exactly how one should listen to the new album from the War on Drugs, “Lost in the Dream."
It’s more than the profound pleasantness of heyday FM radio that the War on Drugs capture and make their own. It’s the yearning for a distant past that we think we’ll reach if we just take the road far enough in pursuit of a long-lost lover who alone holds the power of our rejuvenation. Sometimes I think that every radio hit released in the 1980s riffed on the nostalgia of heartbreak—“Love Is a Long Road,” “Dancing in the Dark,” “The Boys of Summer”—and I can only imagine listening to them with the window rolled down and the horizon calling my name.
This is the legacy that the War on Drugs have inherited. The road is the medium on which life’s journey plays out, whether lost on back streets looking for the address your new girlfriend gave you, or speeding down the highway away from the wreckage of a crash-and-burn relationship. The sound that Adam Granduciel and company have cultivated over the years is so drenched in gauzy guitar reverb and “Born in the USA”-era Springsteen that they’ve pioneered a new genre, dubbed “bossgaze” by a puckish Pitchfork staffer.
“Lost in the Dream,” their third album, continues this tradition of updating Springsteen and Petty. It begins with an out-of-place ticking that quickly builds into hazy rumble, like the sound an old clunker makes when you put keys in the ignition for the first time after a long winter. Listening to the War on Drugs after their three year hiatus is similarly panic inducing. Their 2011 record “Slave Ambient” sounded so good, ran so well, that I wondered if they might need an oil check after so long of a break. I needn’t have worried. Thirty seconds in, the struggling mass of sound suddenly resolves into the memorable piano riff that drives the opener, “Under the Pressure.” Thirty seconds in, and “Lost in the Dream” is running beautifully.
Granduciel has gained the reputation of a perfectionist, which explains the delay between albums. He hasn’t been wasting his time, however. This record, despite its lo-fi pretensions, might be the best-produced album since Daft Punk’s “Random Access Memories.” The length of each song—seven clock in at over five minutes—allows the band to sprawl out on the open highway, giving them room to both maneuver U-turns and build chilling crescendos. The piano in “Under the Pressure” inconspicuously drops out three minutes in, replaced by a horn section that gives the song enough soul to ride out the remaining five minutes in a happy groove. As Granduciel alters the melody slightly, singing “lying on a hill / dancing in the rain / hiding in the back / loosening my grip,” you can feel your hips move in the driver’s seat before the refrain bursts out of him. The same goes for “Red Eyes,” which, inspired by the euphoric build-up of “Dancing in the Dark,” feels like a car merging onto a highway right as Granduciel gives a life-affirming exclamation and the guitars explode into an instantly classic riff.
These moments of brilliance, though sprinkled throughout the album, do run the risk of getting lost in the dream themselves. They sound so natural, so utterly essential, that they slide into the background, biding their time until the alert listener stumbles on them. Such is Granduciel’s craft, taking an era of rock radio not known for its subtlety and drawing out the complex world of human relationships and emotions on an ethereal, druggy highway.
Last summer, as my dad and I were driving back from a late-night concert, we discussed the various tatters that had become our lives. He moved to grab a comforting CD—presumably Petty—but I suggested we give my music a chance. As we forged forward, awash in streetlamp amber, I put on the War on Drugs. We sat silently, moving endlessly, nowhere behind us, nowhere ahead. The road is life, and this is its soundtrack.

Hipster drivel

Sun Kil Moon sings stories of tragedy in new album ‘Benji’

February 28, 2014

My grandpa died when I was sixteen. I had recently moved to Maine, and he to Walla Walla—the bookends of the Miles family were at the bookends of the nation. Though I had met the man only twice, I knew I should feel sad at his passing. It was the first experience I had with the loss of my own flesh and blood, so in deference to his memory, I collapsed onto the gray carpeting, happy to feel sad. Stupidly, comically, I hooked up my computer to some speakers, pulled up iTunes, and double-clicked on “Champagne Supernova” by Oasis, a song that isn’t about death—a song that isn’t really about anything at all. In my head, the death of my grandfather is inextricably connected to 1995 Britpop excess.

Life doesn’t make sense, and I get the feeling that neither does death. We might not be able to have one without the other, but that doesn’t justify the passing of loved ones. Death might be the mother of beauty, but just how beautiful are the deaths of our mothers?

Mark Kozelek, alias Sun Kil Moon, doesn’t ask this question on his new album “Benji,” but the entire thing sounds like something of an answer. He offers no cure-all for grief, but still finds ways to make us laugh. “Benji” is one of the saddest, most poignant albums released this decade, and the most deeply, awkwardly and honestly human.

My first attempt to listen to it took place at 2:00 a.m. on a Friday night. I barely made it past the instant-classic opening lines of “Oh Carissa, when I first saw you, you were a lovely child / The last time I saw you, you were fifteen and pregnant and running wild” before protesting to the night that it was just too damn sad. I tried again the next day, only to find myself crying in Hawthorne-Longfellow Library as Carissa’s story unfolded.

“Benji” is about stories and how our memories relate to each other to form some graspable narrative. It feels more like short story cycle than an album. The feeling is compounded by the fact that Kozelek doesn’t sing songs. He mumbles them like the soft and gentle sound of euthanasia, without concern for chorus or meter, a stream-of-consciousness vomit befitting King Kendrick. Sure, there’s an acoustic guitar, and even a soft-rock sax on closer “Ben’s My Friend,” but these instruments merely add interest. The emphasis on his writing is awkward as he crams weighty lines into fractured meters. This unbalanced eeriness turns the listener into a healthy visitor peering from room to room in a hospice home.

Kozelek’s brutal, gut-wrenching honesty would border on the voyeuristic if not for his ability to sound tender and intensely human when discussing his cousin’s fiery death. The closest he comes to a chorus is in the lilting lullaby line “Carissa was 35, you don’t just raise two kids, take out your trash, and die.”

Her death is made all the more tragic by its circumstance, the moment when “an aerosol can blew up in the trash,” reducing her home to a hell just as she was about to “start her midnight shift as RN in Wadsworth.” But then—get this—we find that her grandfather, Kozelek’s uncle, died in the exact same way. It’s true, if only because you can’t make this shit up. “Goddamn,” Kozelek muses, deadpan, “what were the odds?”

The only solutions to life’s absurd sadness that Kozelek envisions are the stories he weaves. On “Pray for Newtown,” he freely admits that he’s no praying man, and that maybe if he were, death wouldn’t seem so senseless. The best he can do, then, is to “sing and pray for women and children and moms and dads and brothers and sisters and uncles and aunts” affected by the massacre. He knows how woefully inadequate his poultice is for despair, but that shouldn’t stop us, when we’re getting married or out shopping, from reflecting. Memory may hinder our ability to move on, but Kozelek implores us to cherish what we do remember—about our relatives, our first loves, our childhoods—before we lose them to Alzheimer’s or rogue aerosol spray cans.

“Now to find some poetry, to make some sense of this, to find a deeper meaning,” Kozelek sings on “Carissa,” sounding unconvinced that he can, but assuring his dead cousin anyway: “I’ll sing your name across every sea.”

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