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EDIT INFOSun Kil Moon - Ghosts Of The Great Highway
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Album Details
- Artist: Sun Kil Moon
- Album: Ghosts Of The Great Highway
- Label: Jetset
- Year of Release: 2003
- ME Rating:
- Reviewed by: jparker on 2003-12-04
RecommendSun Kil Moon is he new band of Mark Kozelek, formerly of Red House Painters. This is a big, deep, album, one that begs repeated listenings. Perhaps that's why it's named "Ghosts of the Great Highway" - for that title seems to capture the sense of discovery within. I've only listened to it a few times, and the lyrics haven't quite revealed themselves to me yet - though at times they're hard to decipher. Mark Kozelek's voice is somewhere between Ron Sexsmith and Lyle Lovett, until he uses falsetto, which for some reason makes me think of '70s rock (but it's great, really). What shines through on this album is the exceptional, relaxed confidence of the players, and the spacious mood. The mellow, countryish "Glenn Tipton" and "Carry Me Ohio" open the album, but the noisy guitar drone of "Salvador Sanchez" brings you back into modern post-whatever territory. Epic! It starts like the end of a particularly loud Wilco song, and continues for six minutes. "Floating" and "Gentle Moon" relax into alt-country again, but "Lily and Parrots" rocks with heavy chords and soaring harmonies. Definitely a standout. The 14-minute "Duk Koo Kim" follows, an atmospheric melding of guitar harmonics and falsetto vocals. (Again, I hear '70s sounds again - Alan Parsons? Christopher Cross? ELO? I'll have to listen to this album a lot more and drive out those unfortunate associations.) "Duk Koo Kim" extends into a jazzy Chicago-sounding thing, defying stylistic boundaries yet sounding perfectly natural. The album closes with the pretty instrumental "Si Paloma" and the sighingly beautiful "Pancho Villa". A rich, complex, beautiful album that will please fans of both guitar rock and modern pop.
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on 2012-02-22 CharlesMartel Said:
Mark Kozelek may have done more than anybody else to make slowcore a musical style worth listening to, but the Red House Painters were, in my view, unique. By the time Kozelek had formed Sun Kil Moon, the world had moved on, but Kozelek had not. The Red House Painters were killed off largely by record company intransigence and stupidity - nothing new there - but Kozelek's attempt to distance himself from their legacy while living off the reflected glow of their reputation was not as successful as he may have hoped.
"Ghosts of the Great Highway " comes with the huge weight of expectations - from Kozelek and on himself - that it was almost bound to let the listener down. There are moments in this album, such as during parts of " Salvador Sanchez" , when the project seems to be close to realising the potential Kozelek saw in it. Yet those moments are few and far between. Then, just as easily, everything gets ruined by the insertion of a real clunker like "Lily and Parrots" - hard rock is not Kozelek's style. It is almost as if, having decided not to resurrect the Red House Painters, Kozelek was at something of a loss as to what to do.
"Ghosts of the Great Highway " contains a number of melancholy songs which are not at all melancholy and a number of cheerful songs which are not that cheerful. What you are left with is some, at times, rather generic indie folk rock which puts little distance between itself and any number of other bands ploughing the same field. The trouble is, that Neil Young has already ploughed this field and there are no more nutrients in the soil to sustain further harvests. As a consequence, the outcome is rather barren at times and certainly does not live up to expectations.
A talent like Mark Kozelek really ought to have been able to come up with something better after he quit his job as a red house painter. The trouble is that, in an occasional attempt to be upbeat, psychologically, he seems to have lost the songwriting technique that he displayed when he was a miserable sod. Sun Kil Moon may have gone on to other things, but if careers are defined by first albums (an axiom which is not always true) then "Ghosts of the Great Highway" set Sun Kil Moon on the path to generic mediocrity. Or was I just expecting too much?
Rating: 6/10
