Panera Bread, Stevie Nicks, the Portland Mall, Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings, KFC funerals, midnight movies, and Wilco’s Nels Cline are all name-checked throughout Sun Kil Moon’s latest album, Benji.
Stark, unassuming, and deeply nostalgic, former Red House Painter frontman Mark Kozelek, the San Fransisco-based songwriter behind the Sun Kil Moon moniker, plays his songs like he’s just experienced them. There is an off-the-cuff, journalistic feeling to his music. Kozelek, now approaching his 50s, isn’t bothering with far reaching allegory here. There’s nothing behind his words to search for, no further meaning. They are what they are. He’s merely talking in most of the songs--his rhymes even seem uninspired, but they work on a very visceral level. “In the winters us kids would order Domino's and watch ‘Happy Days.’ And in the summer we’d get frogs at the pond and fry up their legs. My aunt still lives there, out in Ohio.”
Full disclosure: this is the first time I’ve listened to his music, but right off the bat, he sounds like a lot of familiar strains of more traditional American music: “Sea Change”-era Beck, pre-Bon Iver Justin Vernon, and stripped down Springsteen (Benji’s album cover, with its uneventful photo of middle American landscape, fits right in with Springsteen's Nebraska cover). There are even traces of Daniel Johnston here, though more grounded. Take “I Watched the Film the Song Stayed the Same.” It’s a 10-minute song that has Kozelek lamenting verse after verse with no chorus over lightly spiraling nylon guitar figures. “I was a melancholy kid when everything close to me in the world died,” he sings.
Many of the songs, like “I Watched the Song...,” deal with death. A girl who sat near him in school died in an accident, but was soon forgotten by her classmates; the death of a grandmother, uncle, friend, etc. The album’s opener, “Carissa,” details a mother who dies in a fire. There is another ode to his father’s friend, an avid boxing fan, in “Jim Wise.” Other lines, though not catchy or delivered in any interesting way, say so much. “I was never a schoolyard bully,” or “I discovered I cannot shake melancholy.”
Then there is “I Love My Dad,” one of the few upbeat songs on the album. The song will either make you laugh for its cheesy forwardness or admire for being such a simple homage. In interviews, Kozelek sounds like a your uncle who doesn’t want to be bothered, and he’s stated that he’d rather have the music speak for itself instead of telling everyone what his songs means. And he’s right. It’s all there anyway, in plain modern english. There’s no wall separating him and his music.
It seems that every song on the album in some way is recognizing people, places, and things that go unnoticed on a day-to-day basis. But then there is Kozelek, making the ordinary seem extraordinary.
Grade: B
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