by Rock & Roll Ghost
MP3: Sun Kil Moon – “Lucky Man”
Sun Kil Moon’s Ghosts of the Great Highway is among the very best albums released so far this millennium and will hopefully be recognized as such when this beyond dreadful decade finally draws to a close. And on April, Sun Kil Moon’s Mark Kozelek has nearly matched the power and beauty of that classic release. Though it took a long time to realize, and comes after a quirky and questionable album of Modest Mouse covers entitled Tiny Cities, April is Kozelek at his most impassioned, languid and gorgeous. Nothing worth doing is worth doing in a hurry and songs here often stretch the lengths of radio programmers’ sanity.
But Kozelek isn’t making music for them, or, in all honesty, for you, or me or anyone else. He makes music based on a primal need to make sense of the world at large and in doing so, it becomes essential to those out there who happen to get it. There is no pandering to be had, no goal of chart success or longing for fame with Kozelek here. Just the finest possible music made by an artist with a vision.
April is eleven songs of beauty, grace and majesty, evoking the best of the past and the present in rock’s history, but never straying one iota from Kozelek’s vision of love, loss, heartbreak and redemption. His canvas is a wide open field with a single house in the distance, a lovely field in the forefront and a raging storm coming in. April is life in all of its unpredictability and ferocity. It is also the finest album of the year thus far.
Choice Cuts: Buy this album!!!
OK, just because you’ve said its great, I’ll buy it.