All things Mark Kozelek

[nielsgov]

This album is a lot more interesting instrumentally than Benji. There's lots of variety. I love the riff in With A Sort of Grace and those dreamy parts with distant vocals make Little Rascals one of my favorite songs on here. The lyrics are definitely less inspriring though and that does drag it down a bit. Finishing a song that lasted 10 minutes and had a lot of lyrics and not knowing what the point was, is frustrating. Bit I guess that's what he was going for. I still like it a lot though.

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[liamcool]

Mabe this is me sucking on Kozelek's teet, but I think the universal themes of the album are pretty obvious. The Possum is about death and meaninglessness, With A Sort Of Grace...is about friends being sick and the associated fear, This Is My First Day is about the fear of failure and the joy of success in mundane and surreal situations, Garden of Lavender is about nostalgia in the smallest moments in life, etc etc. I think all of these themes are relatable, it's just that Kozelek goes about writing about them in a very particular, obscure and inaccessible manner.

 

[LemonMelon]

I get that it's slap-dash, but Universal Themes is a way more interesting and creative album than Benji. It just came out post-asshole Koz, so everyone bags on it. Whatever. In 20 years, nobody will give a fuck and come crawling back, unless Mark kills somebody.

 

[cobl04]

After a few more spins... yeah, I don't really like this album. I also don't buy this idea that's a lot more interesting or creative than Benji. It's different musically, sure, but it hardly reinvents the wheel. With a Grace is quite heavy, Ali/Spinks 2 has a good, different groove and several of the tracks have interesting instrumental detours, but with an average running time of 794 minutes per track nearly every song outstays its welcome. (And I think you're (pl.) underselling Benji; that has a lot of underlaid guitar parts, beautifully double-tracked vocals, on-point drumming, cheesy, shitty Casio chords that make Mark himself cry, super-intricate, Nick Drake-esque acoustic guitar playing, even horns. And even when the music is simplistic it still fits every song so well.) The Possum is salvageable, and Ali/Spinks 2 I quite like despite hating it at first, and there are good parts in most of the songs, but yeah, won't be high on my end-of-year list. The lyrics are extremely tedious and something I didn't mention in my last post is that for a lot of the album he's singing in a higher register and he doesn't really pull it off so that grates quite a bit. I'm happy y'all motherfuckers like it but I don't really.

But that's okay because I still have Benji and Ghosts of the Great Highway and plenty more from him to check out

 

[LemonMelon]

It's cool. Take it or leave it, it's all good. I think Ali/Spinks 2 was the perfect track to release first because it immediately let you know what you were getting into. I heard that electric guitar that sounded straight out of the first two records and got chills. It just went on from there. I love the frankness and humor of the lyrics, I love the rambling song lengths with 2-3 songs tucked into each track, I love the variety of the instrumentation. It's an album that he needed to make because Benji carried forward a rather static musical development from the previous two records. April was the last Sun Kil Moon to really surprise me on a musical front, until Universal Themes.

Which isn't to say that Benji isn't wonderful. It's his second best record behind Ghosts of the Great Highway. The storytelling is dazzling and the melodies are sturdy. It was a new peak for him as a lyricist. I felt as if I was hearing someone reach the other side of a psychological breakthrough. But if Koz is one day remembered for being that grumpy guy that mumbles over quiet acoustic guitars, it will be for albums like Benji and Admiral Fell Promises, not Universal Themes. Benji is a meat and potatoes folk record that refuses to let the musical details cloud the big picture and that's a major strength. But honestly, if the lyrics hadn't been so enthralling, I probably would have forgotten about it already. Meanwhile, Universal Themes could be an engaging instrumental record for its arrangements alone. The lyrics are a step back because they often lack a profound emotional center, but thankfully there's still plenty to like.

Ultimately, this is all hypothetical. I love Benji as it is. I really like Universal Themes. I wish Koz would shut up sometimes.

 

[cobl04]

ok i agreed with this shit so now i have to change my opinion

 

[liamcool]

I like Universal Themes more than Benji, at least right now.

That's...uh. Kind of astonishing.

 

[cobl04]

Mark Kozelek to Release Spoken Word Album, Collaborating With Slowdive's Rachel Goswell | News | Pitchfork

 

[liamcool]

Here's a conversation about music and boxing between Mark Kozelek and Anar Badalov.

 

[cobl04]

New EP in October! Caldo Verde Records

 

[liamcool]

Here we go, again.

 

[bono_212]

He's getting ridiculous now.

 

[cobl04]

Except he doesn't have a successful album to ride on the coattails of this time around. I think this one sounds pretty funny reading the article (no Nando's Chicken, of course, but what is?) but he's slipping pretty quickly into irrelevancy.

If nothing else though I learned that Dream Police is by Cheap Trick and now I'm angry at iYup for all his slights against them over the years. Dream Police is a great song!

 

[iron yuppie]

Hahaha I do hate Cheap Trick. On my Rushmore for worst bands ever.

 

[liamcool]

A good song does not make a horrible band good.

(I do like He's A Whore.)

 

[LemonMelon]

He's a Whore is awesome. As is the rest of the first album.

 

[martha]

Hahaha I do hate Cheap Trick. On my Rushmore for worst bands ever.

They were better live, too.

 

[LemonMelon]

FWIW, I think a song about how much Ottawa music festivals suck, sung to the tune of Dream Police sounds promising on paper.

 

[elevated_u2_fan]

As someone who lives in Ottawa I can verify that his subject matter is correct. It does strike me as incredibly lazy though, like writing a song about water being wet or the sun rising in the East...

 

[cobl04]

I don't know any Jesu (aren't they metal?) but this is a really really nice song, "America's Most Wanted Mark Kozelek and John Dillinger". Kozelek still has the Universal Themes cadence that I detest quite a bit but the music is really nice instead of dissonant and he relaxes his vocals a bit.

Jesu / Sun Kil Moon

collab album out Feb 19

 

[cobl04]

Of course it features like three minutes of Kozelek reading out a sycophantic fan letter.

 

[david]

Less than 25 people attend a Mark Kozelek show:

http://www.stereogum.com/1845186/le...?utm_source=sc-fb&utm_medium=ref&utm_campaign


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[LemonMelon]

Comment section reveals the figure to be closer to 100. The venue is pissed about the article:

“We would like comment on the recent Stereogum & NME Magazine articles about Mark Kozelek’s recent show in ‪#‎LNK‬. The numbers reported are completely inaccurate and were not verified with the venue.
The original source – The Daily Nebraskan (a student-run newspaper of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln) is in the process of making the correction.
It’s extremely disappointing to see this inaccurate, bad journalism magnified to an international level in what seems to be an attempt to disparage the artist.
These publications are viewed as being reputable. Please make the requested correction. We would be happy to provide you with accurate information.”

 

[cobl04]

This is like the LCD reunion all over again.

 

[liamcool]

...I would pay any earthly sum to sit in an audience of 25 at a Mark Kozelek show.

 

[LemonMelon]

I would too. The description of that show sounds utterly fantastic.

 

[liamcool]

The letter at the end of "Last Night I Rocked The Room Like Elvis and Had Them Laughing Like Richard Pryor" is fucking tremendous.

 

[cobl04]

It was probably from the same gig I went to. I'm listening to a few tracks from this thing now and whilst it seems immediately better than Universal Themes, it still suffers from the defiant self-indulgence that ruined that album. Maybe I'm just a Benji hipster.

The good is great, the bad is grating.

 

[cobl04]

"All you motherfuckers suck my hundred-million-dollar dick."

 

[liamcool]

Here's a picture of the lyric sheet.

I'm liking this more and more, though it definitely has weaknesses! I'm not too fond of "Fragile", and I think Kozelek's obsession with Nick Cave's dead son is a touch weird, but that's what Kozelek does - zeroes in on the minutae of everyday existence and expands it.