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folk music

Album Review: Sun Kil Moon – Benji

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Benjisunkilmoon

Sun Kil Moon: Benji

Similar Artists: Low, Neil Young, Wilco

Genre: Folk

Label: Caldo Verde

While singer/songwriter Mark Kozelek has made a career off of making dour songs ripe with honesty and regret, his latest record may still surprise fans in terms of how direct it is. While his 90s outfit Red House Painters became recognized for how their dour songs commonly lacked metaphors (allowing their audience to know exactly why they were so sad), and his subsequent folk rock act Sun Kil Moon would continue in a similar melancholic trajectory, there still is something particularly sound about this most recent release, Benji. It’s a sad record as one would expect, but it’s also immensely auto-biographical, with every song being a first-person account of an event in Kozelek’s life, with allusions to his childhood, tragedies, career, love life and even his interests (the album’s title is from the 1974 dog-centric children’s film Benji, which was one of Mark’s favorites growing up). It’s a move that could have resulted in an album that was ultimately sappy and/or esoteric, but instead Kozelek has giving his fans a most grandiose statement, that may very well go down as his masterpiece. For the first time in quite a while actually (perhaps not since 2003’s Ghost of the Great Highway) does Sun Kil Moon feel fully in it’s element, and not just because this is Mark’s talent, but it is his essence.

Sun Kil Moon (which has now become more of a solo project for Kozelek) doesn’t really change it’s aesthetic for Benji, so much as it just adjusts the focus. It could very well be considered a concept album, as recurring names, situations and themes come up within the album’s 11 songs, and the most common aside is death. With Kozelek now in his late 40s, he really does seem to be feeling an uneasy sense of mortality, and not just his own. “I don’t like this getting older stuff/Having to pee fifty times a day is bad enough” he sings on Richard Ramirez Died Today of Natural Causes, a track where Kozelek name drops not just the late serial killer of the title, but also James Gandolfini and Elvis Presley’s passings. The songs Carissa, Truck Driver, and Micheline are all about passed family members (Mark’s second cousin, uncle, and grandmother respectively), and Prayer for Newtown is a very intense song in which Kozelek recalls a series of brutal public shootings. It’s enough to make one ponder if The Funeral would have been a better title for this album, had another indie rock outfit not already used it.

Of course, this concern over death certainly brings up nostalgia for youth as well, although not always in the most comforting manner. On the song Dogs, Mark talks about his early sexual history in a dark and seemingly regretful manner – “Mary Anne was my first fuck. She slide down between my legs and oh my god she could suck/I went with her friend first but I couldn’t get it in. And when she caught me with Mary Anne her heart was broken.” – which actually reveals a lot about Mark’s frequently troubling lyrics about romance and sex. Still, he also makes it apparent that he’s lived with a melancholic frame of mind, and this is best elaborated in I Watched the Film the Song Remains the Same. This 10 minute song (which does indeed refer to the Lex Zeppelin concert film) finds Mark summarizing his 46 years in a nutshell, from his schoolyard days as an outsider, to his unexpected success as a musician. “From my earliest memories I was a melancholic kid,” he croons in the song, and also states that his sadness is something that he expects to always be with him.

It’s not all doom and gloom though, as Mark does sing of things in his life that do bring him great joy. On I Can’t Live Without my Mother’s Love, he reiterates that his mother is his best friend as well as protector, and laments the day that she will have to leave him. He also refers to his father on I Love my Dad and Jim Wise, the latter of which features Owen Ashworth on rhodes piano, as Kozelek recounts a day he and his father visited a friend on house arrest for helping his wife commit suicide. The song even ends with a fairly upbeat song, Ben’s my Friend, an ode to Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard, and even includes some jazz-esque use of horns in it. The result of placing such a track at the end of such a dark and dour record is akin to receiving that great surge of optimism one receives after overcoming a depression. A very welcome final track, that acts as a bit more than just a glimmer of hope.

So yes, Benji is a rather astounding record that should appeal both to his fandom and otherwies. It’s also certain to surprise people to discover that it actually improves on each listen, as while even if you feel you may have gathered all that Mark wants to say through an initial listen, returns will expose subtle uses of harmony and rhythm that really make you appreciate how the album is both elegiac yet forceful. A perfect album for late winter too, as I feel all of us are feeling a little bit of a need for transition right now.

Track Listing

1.) Carissa

2.) I Can’t Live Without My Mother’s Love

3.) Truck Drive

4.) Dogs

5.) Pray for Newtown

6.) Jim Wise

7.) I Love My Dad

8.) I Watched the Film the Song Remains the Same

9.) Richard Ramirez Died Today of Natural Causes

10.) Micheline

11.) Ben’s My Friend

Journeying Inside Llewyn Davis

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Poster for Inside Llewyn Davis
Poster for Inside Llewyn Davis

The trailer for the new Coen brothers movie was a surprisingly dry tease.  With stilted, almost Mumblecore dialog in desaturated imagery over Bob Dylan’s folk chords, the trailer sold the movie as any other 20-something inspired indie flick.  To frustrate the viewer further, it cuts to black before the audience even hears Llewyn’s first acoustic strum.  Upon unwrapping, however, Inside Llewyn Davis proves to be a box stuffed full of the Coen brothers’ best working habits, complete with amusingly dysfunctional failures of characters, dialog that variously nips and bites, and for what it’s worth, the best folk soundtrack for a movie seen since… well, the Coen brothers’ other folk-inspired Odyssey, O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Inside Dave Van Ronk album cover
Take note of this cover.

Oscar Isaac takes up the role of a couch-surfing New York folk singer in 1961, who is also a physical amalgamation of early Bob Dylan and his colleague Dave Van Ronk (the latter comparison is revealed explicitly by the cover of Llewyn’s new solo album Inside Llewyn Davis, which remakes the cover of real life album Inside by Dave Van Ronk).   The movie begins in media res with an answer to the cutaway of the trailer, by settling right in to a concert at The Gaslight in Greenwich Village (again, Van Ronk’s old haunting grounds).  After a pleasant introductory song you get used to the smoky enchantment of the place, rendered by new(ish) Coen brother collaborator Bruno Delbonnel (Roger Deakins was busy shooting Skyfall, so the brothers hired the director of photography from their Paris, je t’aime short).  Once the piece is over, however, events quickly turn brutal, as Llewyn apologizes for hitherto unknown drunken actions of the night before to his barkeep friend, and then gets kicked and beaten outside the bar.

It turns out that the beginning is a bookend device and the background to these events are strung out from there.  Llewyn Davis is feckless at best: sleeping in an unending circle of his friends’ couches, dropping his equipment off hither tither, and trying to run away from either some crushing responsibility or inner demons, it only becomes clear later which.  He’s the existential and dramatic counterpoint to a slapstick hero, his thoughts always one step behind his own actions, resulting in a cascade of negative consequences.

Within the first couple of scenes he loses his upscale professor friend’s cat and is chewed out by Jean (Carey Mulligan), girlfriend of Jim (Justin Timberlake) for possibly getting her pregnant.  Situations never really settle from there.  As Llewyn Davis traverses the lonely New York City landscape, staving off fatigue and rolling over his debt against time into higher interest rates, we get further insight into the nature of his base circumstances.   It turns out that he’s being left behind as Jean’s and Jim’s careers start to blossom, the folk scene starts to crystallize, and Llewyn has to make a decision between finding work and dedicating himself to his art.  Thus the odyssey starts, as Llewyn seeks a way to get cash from his agent, the cat back to the Gorfeins, and the attention of record executive Bud Grossman, not to mention come to terms with his defiantly hidden feelings for Jean.  This journey will bounce him up and down Manhattan’s west sides and between New York and Chicago, while running him into a variety of Coenish characters such as John Goodman’s appearance as a batty and overweight jazz musician.

As a central character, Llewyn can sometimes be difficult to stomach.  With an abrasive personality, caustic attitude, and a constantly burning frustration, he’s every deadbeat mooch you’ve ever been friends with, except slightly more parasitic.  Nevertheless the Coens actually manage to not only provoke sympathy, but actually all out empathy for his character.  For all his screw-ups he doesn’t have much of a choice, and ultimately his inner motivations come down to things and people he’s lost well before the movie started.  The trip he takes doesn’t operate quite like a Hero’s Journey, but rather is the medium through which we gain insight into his past.  Thus the movie elegantly lives up to its name.

Whether audiences will muster it will be a different question.  Inside Llewyn Davis is inverse O Brother, Where Art Thou?.  Where the latter is colorful and fun the former is drab and so dry it crackles.  Where the O Brother sold its soundtrack, the soundtrack sells Llewyn Davis.  And rather than adapting The Odyssey with folk music, Llewyn Davis structures folk music history around an odyssey.  The result is the exact type of movie that excites critics but depresses audiences.