Admiral Fell Promises - Sun Kil Moon

Admiral Fell Promises

Sun Kil Moon
Caldo Verde Records.

SCQ Rating: 86%

“Have you heard this yet?” Heather asked suddenly, lifting a copy of Admiral Fell Promises from a pile on her bed. No, my girlfriend Emily replied, explaining how she and I had been saving it until autumn came around. The end of September had ushered the beginning of fall and, although the outside gardens were still wet with green, we decided to end our Sun Kil Moon fasting. Heather hadn’t heard it properly either, having tried it once in her fiancé’s noisy car and given up. Now that fiancé is a husband, Heather’s his wife, and the soft finger-plucked notes of ‘Alesund’ dance into a room threatened by abandonment. Wall decorations that have marked her territory from student flops to this parental loft now lie on the bed, while cherished CDs have been pillaged from their shelves. Endless pamphlets for wedding locations, wedding dresses, wedding caterers and honeymoon resorts fold crisply into the trash.

Emily and I sat against Heather’s closed door, exhausted from a day of Boston shopping and Indian cuisine. No sooner had I arrived at the house when I developed a fever, something that made Mark Kozelek’s stripped arrangements more isolating but no less soothing. Certain tracks spoke out more immediately, like the sweetly melodic title track that harkens back to April’s more contemplative material. That’s the problem with the present, though; trying to determine the worth of a current moment seems impossible next to the power of a later memory. Admiral Fell Promises works no differently, expelling the attributes that would catch most listeners off-guard in favour of slow-burning melodies that dig under our skins over time.

Drinking tea on the floor and hopelessly dazed, I was still vulnerable to Kozelek’s skeletal atmospheres developed over lonely nylon strings. ‘Half Moon Bay’ speaks to New Hampshire’s blanketed night, its almost bluesy refrain carried by a haunted vocal performance. The bleak ‘Australian Winter’ burrows further toward autumn’s frozen end, begging for a fireside to warm our faces from all Kozelek’s old-fashioned inhospitality. Although technically astounding in their naked skill, these cold-hearted compositions can’t be salvaged by Kozelek’s warm timbre alone, his guitar’s darkness enveloping us no differently than the mouth of night swallowing this farmhouse. To quell the burden, the majority of these lengthy tracks drift off into incidental classical figures that provide a lighthearted bent to ‘The Leaning Tree’ and deepen the emotional complexity of ‘Third and Seneca’. And occasionally, as on ‘Church Of the Pines’, Kozelek breaks into bouts of experimentation, seemingly testing passages off of each other to see how they gel. Naturally, they do.

An hour of such narrow scope can understandably blur upon early listens and the calm beauty of ‘Bay Of Skulls’ closed the disc while we conversed unaware. Heather was due to take her luggage to the new apartment downtown but ended up staying late to watch bad movies, snack, and take comfort in the cozy paralysis a farmhouse affords after dark. Most of Admiral Fell Promises’ virtually endless subtleties were lost on us then, leaving only gentle progressions that scored tired conversations, but I’m swimming in those details now. Maybe, like all of Sun Kil Moon’s best work, that’s what substitutes all of Admiral Fell Promises’ empty space: memories. Those occasional waves of reflection in which you realize the implications of what was once an ironed-flat, cause-and-effect present and the crises, the ruts, and rites of passage you now admit as your past. Wistful for whatever reasons, maybe that’s the push Kozelek’s music gives us: to feel those moments we lost to the present.

“I’m really glad we waited until fall to hear that,” I told Emily the next morning, but I didn’t know the half of it. Rarely has a record stirred my interest in guitar tones so, and those obsessive codas have followed my park-side walks to work ever since our New England trip. Reminiscent of the four-track EP that April came bundled with, Admiral Fell Promises showcases Kozelek surveying the space of his own charisma, subdued but undeniably hypnotic. If memories are to assist us beyond the anecdotal excuses of this record review, let them highlight the refinement we’ve undergone as individuals since. And for Mark Kozelek, let Admiral Fell Promises stand as his sophisticated peak, a masterpiece of his former self.

April - Sun Kil Moon

April

Sun Kil Moon
Caldoverde Records.

SCQ Rating: 72%

Despite the strange and isolated corners my love for music may often occupy, nothing brings me back to my roots like a solid folk record. Upon hearing its subtle moods, its careful strumming, I’m delivered back to my childhood afternoons cradled on the basement couch with my dad’s headphones blaring the music of the 70s. A youth of hearing the James Taylor records of my parent’s comes softly to mind as I listen to Mark Kozelek’s third album under the Sun Kil Moon moniker. Like what you can only expect from the most introspective singer songwriter, April is cloaked in unplugged minimalism and lyrical obscurities; its secrets seeping from repeated listens.

All the same, a Sun Kil Moon record can’t be summed up by the tag-word ‘folk’ alone. With eleven tracks settling at 74 minutes, April is prone to classic rock and slowcore comparisons just as convincingly, the latter clearly dealing with the more superficial issue of running-time. Enough genre-ambiguity ensures April its own territory to shine, and it’s for the best; the Leonard Cohen musings and Neil Young guitar-slaying of opener ‘Lost Verses’ is enough to make anyone give up deciphering how Kozelek might feel about what Dylan did at the Royal Albert Hall forty-odd years ago.

These songs are meant to be heard outside the concrete jungles we’ve grown in, words for the rural expanses you’ve only walked from the passenger seat. ‘The Light’, like all of the LP, is a tight meditation on the guitar riff and how it can breathe relief or stiffen to a tough snarl; Kozelek’s gift is writing a seven-minute song that consistently thrills based on such minimal compositions. Occupying the best of these quiet reflections is ‘Moorestown’s string-drenched play-by-play and ‘Like the River’ (which enlists the fabulous Bonnie Prince Billy on backing vocals).

That these songs rely on repetition also means that your initial reaction to a song’s first minute will likely also be your last. The backwoods eeriness of ‘Heron Blue’, for example, steers clear of April’s usual warmth and tires by the five-minute mark. Although each track lends a hand to April’s unshakably rustic atmosphere, a few dwell in their place for too long and risk reducing the record’s strengths.

In truth, I’ve been delaying this review for a month now, waiting for a weekend up north to properly live out April’s far-reaching introspection. The weathered sand dunes and rain-battered sand of unpredictable May should prove a capable cloud to soundtrack Sun Kil Moon after; the kind of nostalgic reminiscing too manly to accept a tissue over.