Lotta good songs – COURTNEY BARNETT, KURT VILE: Lotta sea lices (Milk!, Matador; 2017)

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Uno de los mejores álbumes del pasado 2017 fue sin duda, este Lotta Sea Lices, el disco en el que aunaron sus talentos Courtney Barnett y Kurt Vile; o lo que es lo mismo: lo mejorcito del Pop cálido e intimista junto con lo más florido del Folk-Pop realizado en las últimas décadas. 
Como era de esperar, algo bueno habría de surgir de una unión como ésta, y Lotta Sea Lices lo demuestra. Un álbum que presenta nueve cortes íntimos, llenos de riffs cristalinos, florituras y sensibilidad. Un precioso acercamiento a la Americana desde el punto de vista más Folkie. Courtney y Kurt se versionan mutuamente y descubren otro par de versiones (Belly y Jen Cloher). Un discazo lleno de sensibilidad y de mutua admiración, que por su calidad, se queda incluso corto. ¿Tendrá continuación…?

“As heirs apparent to the throne of ’90s alt-rock, Kurt Vile and Courtney Barnett appear to be an ideal match — comrades in slacktivism united by a shrug and a smirk. If neither singer/songwriter sounds precisely like the other, they’re good complements, both cherishing laconic melodies, loping rhythms, and a loads of guitar. All of these elements are in play on Lotta Sea Lice, a rambling nine-song affair that finds the duo singing each other’s songs, playing tunes penned by friends, and covering Belly‘s “Untogether,” an underappreciated ’90s cult classic that the band once played as a duet withRadiohead‘s Thom Yorke. Barnett and Vile do not bring to mind Yorke and Tanya Donelly, nor do they sound a thing like the original Kurt and Courtney of Nirvana and Hole fame. Singing together, Vile andBarnett evoke J Mascis and Liz Phair, comparisons that have been leveled against the individual rockers before, but on this lazy stroll of an LP, it appears the pair are indulging in alt-rock cosplay. It doesn’t help matters that when they indulge in an explicit duet, they often veer toward the cutesy, as on “Continental Breakfast,” where they puff up their international friendship over the titular meal. Food is a problem with Barnett and Vile: “Blue Cheese,” one of the sprightlier numbers here, is undercut by a performance that suggests the pair know precisely that it’s hookier than the rest of the proceedings, as they lean into a “nanny nanny foo foo” lyric just a tad too hard. Usually, though, Lotta Sea Lice just settles into a cozy rustic groove that dispenses with any of the coiled energy of Barnett‘s Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit. and opts for Vile‘s cheery stoner strumming. As they’re both charismatic singers with a way with an elliptical melody, it’s pleasant enough, but by the time its 45 minutes wrap up, Lotta Sea Lice feels like a party where the hosts are having a much better time than their guests” (All Music)

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Kurt Vile: Pretty Pimpin (Video-Single, Matador, 2015)

Kurt Vile vuelve este otoño (en realidad nunca se ha ido del todo…) con Pretty Pimpin, tremendo temazo que anticipa un nuevo álbum para Septiembre.

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Sore Eros, Kurt Vile: Jamaica plain (2013)

Material antiguo reeditado compuesto por Kurt Vile junto con su viejo amigo Robert Robinson, aka. Sore Eros.

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“It’s become part of Kurt Vile‘s small mythology, insofar as he has one: The few post-high school years he lived in Boston, away from his childhood friends in Philly. This brief purgatory—spent discovering John Fahey, driving a forklift to make ends meet, and wondering where all his friends had gone—was a formative, fertile period, the years in which he discovered and honed his inimitable finger-picking style and zeroed in on the wry, cosmic loneliness that would become his defining sound. He came back to Philly from what he once called his “weird little exile” with his first fully formed songs intact.
The Jamaica Plain EP is an artifact from those earliest days. It’s a collaboration with Robert Robinson, whose solo home-recording project, Sore Eros, concerned itself mostly with sad, blobby tangles of finger-picked guitars and tape manipulation. You can hear some of these same interests in Vile’s earliest work, specifically the water-logged instrumental pieces that dot 2008’s Constant Hitmaker. Vile has mostly left his interest in extreme tape manipulation and soggy lo-fi charm behind him, but the Jamaica Plain EP offers a brief and fitfully pretty glance backwards.
Its three songs are inchoate, modestly lovely, and largely inconsequential, hinting at a time when Vile was starting to figure out his aesthetic. On “Serum”, Robinson’s vocals poke their way through a mix of acoustic guitars, ambient electronics, and tape hiss, blurred together and melted down. The title track has sleepy slide guitar that feels like an early sketch of the little waiting-room-of-the-soul painted on “Goldtone”. The solo guitar piece “Calling Out of Work” is closest to the Vile we recognize today—the chord progression is meandering and gently sad, the electric guitars at the top of the track trail occasionally into firefly wisps. It goes on, unnecessarily, for six minutes, but the late-summer-sky light rays of Vile’s breakthrough Hitmaker peek through, in shafts and glints. That said, it’s hard to imagine who to recommend it to: ephemera and early works can be interesting, even if they’re unsatisfying or mediocre, if they help add to our sense of the artist, suggesting a larger puzzle about how they became great.
it’s a big world out there (and i am scared), an EP of newer material, is pocket lint, to put it bluntly, dug out of the corners of the masterful Wakin On A Pretty Daze. Vile’s a prolific songwriter; there are usually three or four revelatory songs from each album that hit the cutting room floor. His 2011 EP So Outta Reach, drawing on the Smoke Ring For My Halosessions, gave us a lot of extra meat to chew on—his cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “Downbound Train”, for instance. There is less to dig into on it’s a big world—are you excited at the prospect of owning a version of Wakin’s “Never Run Away” with synth strings, with two reprises? How about an extended version of that album’s “Snowflakes”, or an instrumental version of “Airbud”? No?
To be fair, there are two bona-fide new Kurt Vile songs on it’s a big world out there. “Feel My Pain” sounds like a working draft that he later pried apart into two, better songs—”Was All Talk” and “Pure Pain”—when he realized it wasn’t working on its own. “The Ghost of Freddie Roach”, meanwhile, is peak Vile, six slowly unfurling minutes of a coughing drum machine and guitars upon guitars upon guitars—guitars murmuring to each other, guitars strumming off in a corner to themselves, high chiming solos that move so slowly and aimlessly over the top of the mix they blur into texture. It’s an ocean of sound, one that Vile seems to summon as effortlessly as yawning by now. It’s not quite enough to justify both of the appearance of these globs, half-heartedly tossed out onto the pile at the end of a release year, but it’s close” (Pitchfork)

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Kurt Vile: Wakin on a pretty daze (Matador, 2013)

El quinto trabajo de Kurt Vile es un discazo. Dejando a un lado cualquier connotación ruidista, LoFi o incluso feísta, la música de Kurt transcurre por un sendero de calma iniciado en Smoke Ring For My Halo, su último trabajo hasta la fecha.
Vile ha reclutado a sus Violators, se ha puesto manos a la obra y se ha tomado este Wakin on a pretty daze con toda la tranquilidad de la que el de Philadelphia es capaz. Se toma su tiempo y no le importa extender hasta la extenuación sus temas (Wakin on a pretty daze, Was a talk, Air bud, Goldtone, Girl called Alex…), moviéndose grácilmente entre las aguas de un renovado Rock de autor, un sonido del que podemos pensar que rastrea sus huellas en el Folk más tradicional (Father John Misty) o en el más clásico sonido rockista de siempre (Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen). La cuestión es que Wakin on a pretty daze es un disco tremendo, de esos que te entran suave y te calan hasta los tuétanos.
Y, además, no está exento de hitazos momentáneos: KV Crimes (con un aire muy a lo Dream Syndicate), Never run away.
Con un (nuevo) transfondo en el que Vile se aparta de cualquier tipo de sustancias y se convierte en un cantautor responsable y hasta casi familiar (uno de sus hijos aparece en uno de sus vídeos), el sonido de la música de Kurt Vile es absolutamente arrebatador y puesto al día. Muy recomendable.

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“The concept of samsara, one of the Buddha’s four noble truths, holds that all beings are trapped in a self-perpetuating cycle of birth, death and rebirth. Fueled by internal struggle, we turn along an endless wheel of suffering, passing through untold lives in our never-ending quest for enlightenment. Some meditate upon this truth for years; Kurt Vile, on “Life’s a Beach“, nailed it for us in two mumbled words: “Life’s awhile.”
Vile’s music has exuded this unique stoner-Yoda wisdom from the very beginning, even if you weren’t searching for it. His sound– warm, unhurried, and spacious– doesn’t demand close focus, but one of the joys of being pulled into Vile’s lonely, contented universe is in discovering that he is muttering sharply self-aware things to himself.  It adds another layer to Vile’s appeal; seduced by the soothing, watery-blue glimmer of that sound, which promised to make you feel like the only human in the universe, you slowly realized there’s actually one other guy here, and he’s kind of a wiseass.
Wakin on a Pretty Daze is Vile’s most spacious, becalmed record yet, and it contains some of his best-ever brand of cosmic stand-up. It opens, literally, with a stretch and a yawn: On the (almost) title track “Wakin on a Pretty Day“, a wah’ed guitar rubs the grit out of its eyes while Vile beholds his furiously ringing phone with clinical detachment: “Phone ringing off the shelf/ I guess somebody has something they really wanna prove to us today,” he notes. Unperturbed, he moves along, concerned with something far more pressing: “I gotta figure out what kind of wisecrack I’m gonna drop along the way — today.” The music quickens for a beat or two at this prospect, but settles back down. In Vile’s universe, there is time enough for everything.
Accordingly, Wakin on a Pretty Daze moves at its own stately pace and with its own serene logic and time. Songs unfurl for six, or seven, or eight minutes without peaking dynamically or changing; the tangle of finger-picked guitars on “Was All Talk” queue up like synth presets that Vile just lets roll. On most songs, four or five chords cycle for minutes on end, echoing upward into the record’s warm room tone. “Pure Pain” shifts between stomping, hard acoustic chording and two wide-open billowing finger-picked chords that simply hang while Vile muses: “Every time I look out my window/ All my emotions they are speeding/ Zip through the highways in my head.”  It can be occasionally frustrating to interact with a piece of music so fundamentally unconcerned with interaction, but like anything worth truly loving, Wakin on a Pretty Daze opens up slowly. The music, and the act of loving it, are exercises in patience. Or, as Vile puts it sagely on “Too Hard”: “Take your time, so they say, and that’s probably the best way to be.”
Vile’s releases are small variations on each other, and discerning the differences between them comes down to intangibles, things that are difficult to point to: The fact that he only yelps his little “Woo!” twice on “Shame Chamber”  the first time around, for instance, indicating his bone-deep understanding that two “woos,” for now, are plenty. Or the way the silvery guitar leads snake through the album without ever assuming the foreground, murmuring things that reward attention in the same way Vile’s lyrics do. The way the drums nudge gently into the title refrain on “Girl Called Alex”, and how Vile’s “I wanna-” is abruptly cut off by a stinging guitar; these details, small by themselves, offer accumulated testimony to Vile’s mastery of his world. Wakin on a Pretty Daze breezes past like a Klonopin dream, and radiates an easy confidence that is as rewarding to return to as a melody.
“Sometimes when I get in my zone, you’d think I was stoned, but I never as they say ‘touch that stuff,’ ” Vile sings, with a hint of mockery, on Wakin‘s closer “Goldtone.” The song is stunning, a desert island of Kurt Viledom. Ever since Vile signed to Matador, his music has grown warmer and more expansive as he receded further into the privacy of his own mind: On Smoke Ring for My Halo‘s “Ghost Town,” he crooned gently, “I think I’m never gonna leave my couch again/ Cuz when I’m out, I’m only in my mind.” “Goldtone,” and all ofWakin on a Pretty Daze, feels like the culmination of Vile’s quest to get away from people, noises, civilization and find somewhere to sit and whistle his own tune. If Kurt Vile could paint a storybook Heaven, it would look like “Goldtone”, and he signs it with his most poetic, self-aware koan ever:  “I might be adrift but I’m still alert/ Concentrate my hurt into a gold tone.” A guitar pushes a wispy cirrus cloud across the sky, sea-blue chimes glitter, and Vile mumbles his way into the sunset” (Pitchfork)

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Kurt Vile: Jesus fever (Single, 2011)

 

Tremendo tema de adelanto del que será segundo álbum de Kurt Vile para Matador: Smoke ring from my halo (2011), en el que el cantautor parece que inicia una etapa más reflexiva y cercana a la espiritualidad. En cualquier caso, este Jesus fever es un gran tema de aires Pop-Folk que puedes oír y descargar de manera legal y gratuita.

Kurt Vile – Jesus fever (Single, 2011)

“Jesus Fever” joins “In My Time” on the list of advance listens from Kurt Vile’s forthcoming Smoke Ring For My Halo, the Philly songwriter’s second LP for Matador. The sedate jangle and strummer also joins “Overnight Religion” and “God Is Saying This To You” in evincing Vile’s interest in exploring a thematic spirituality, here via lines about being a ghost and the inevitability of being, one day, “already gone,” and the similar inevitability of the inability to “escape this song”; we go, art is forever. Or at least until 2012″ (stereogum.com)

MySpace / Descarga legal gratuita-Free legal download / Oír-Hear: Jesus fever (Single, 2011)