Song of the Day # 333 Sun Kil Moon

I have some kind of history with Mark Kozelek, the artist behind Sun Kil Moon. I bought his previous band Red House Painter's first full album, a double, over 20 years ago in 1993 when I was living in Dortmund, Germany. I didn't have a record player so would listen to it at a friend's when I went round on Friday for a smoke. The record was languorous, resigned but vaguely romantic. And also pretty good though not life shattering. It felt quite young and perhaps overly obsessively introverted.  I still have that record. It's the only album in my collection that is completely warped. It's utterly unplayable, as if the obsessive emotions it contained curdled it in on themselves.

I lost touch with Kozelek. I noticed him again a few years later when he played the bassist in fictional early Seventies Rock band Stillwater in Cameron Crowe's watchable but rather sentimental film Almost Famous. Kozelek's main part in this seemed to be as the guy on the bus who breaks into Elton John's Tiny Dancer leading the resulting sing along. After that nothing until this year.

Sun Kil Moon, Kozelek's current alter-ego released their latest album this year. It attracted an enormous amount of popular acclaim but I didn't actually listen to it until this morning. It's almost immediately apparent how it gathered so much attention. It's brilliant, in a very dark way. It's difficult to think of another album so relentlessly obsessed with mortality and death and so honest in its gaze on it. It's distinctly middle aged and focusses on the concerns of those of us undergoing it. It's also very literary. These could be short stories from Carver or Cheever.

Here's its second track and for someone like me who loves his mother as much if not more than anything in the universe it's enormously affecting. It's alright, she doesn't read this blog and would have no desire to listen to the song whatsoever. She once made the mistake of listening to a song from my collection while hoovering my room and is highly unlikely to make the same mistake again.  This is only one of eleven tracks on the record and every single one of them is equally honest and mercilessly relentless. This makes Kozelek a great artist in my eyes. But not one, that I personally want to spend too much time with. I'd find it rather difficult to go about my life from day to day if his stuff was on repeat rotation in the background. I wonder rather how he himself copes. He's notoriously curmudgeonly so perhaps he's built up a system of defence mechanisms to protect himself.

Nevertheless, I direct you to this album, Benji. It's undoubtedly a great record. Perhaps you're made of stronger stuff than me!