Monday 28 January 2013

Albums for Life: 59: Sun Kil Moon: Ghosts of the Great Highway






One of the good things about the ever prolific Mark Kozelek disbanding The Red House Painters is that I can get two albums out of him for my list; one from the afore mentioned (much later), another from this later reincarnation as Sun Kil Moon.
One minute gentle and almost too beautiful, the next ramping it up like Neil Young's guitar roadie on acid; this particular album favors Kozelek's gentler side. Throwing some beautiful strings at the already gorgeous melodies made for a heady mix and lifted things from the haunting yet often melancholic/morose nature that bedeviled a lot of the RHP's back catalogue; elevating things to a heavenly hum. The boy's always glum and disillusioned but he has such a wonderful way of sharing his misery.


4 comments:

  1. Wonderfully way? Indeed.You beat me to this. I've got it quite a bit higher on my stack...
    I get quite an nasty earful from Myrna whenever I play Krazy Koz. She insists he can't sing!
    The enigmatic Glen Tipton & the sublime Gentle Moon my favorite Kozelek tunes.
    Pop quiz (no Googling!!!)... Do you know the inspiration for Gentle Moon?
    (Revealed in a Koz interview, makes the lyric all the more poignant...)

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  2. Spell check never lets me finish my sentences...
    Nope, you've got me re: the inspiration of 'Gentle Moon'.
    A guess?
    Is it about when he ever so sensitively revealed his buttocks in a cotton factory?

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  3. Good stab, but he actually wrote It about 911 attack on NYC. He said it took several months before he could process it all enough to write a song without venom, focus on the victims...
    Listen back to the song, the lyrics Very potent...
    TT

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  4. I bought the 'Rollercoaster' but somehow lost contact with both it and the subsequent career of Mark Kozelek. Yet another name for the 'must listen' list.

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