Sun Kil Moon
April

If I ever had a glimmer of objectivity in judging an album in my life, this is certainly not the case. Because with Mark Kozelek, you fall right in as if down a pothole in a country road: unexpectedly, ruinously, irreparably. That’s how it’s been ever since, years ago, Red House Painters’ Down Colorful Hill punched me in the stomach with the delicacy of a caress. That voice, that songwriting, that pace of a drunken snail — which is nothing less than the sacred stride of slowcore, or rather, of the kind of sadness that signed up for a gym and learned how to breathe slowly.

It’s been more than thirty years since that thunderbolt, but I still follow Kozelek’s evolutions and reincarnations — ever more of an outsider, ever less compromised.

With April, under the name Sun Kil Moon, he gives us a record that doesn’t even try to win you over: it simply sits there, next to you, and starts talking like an old friend you haven’t seen in ages. And after a while, you realize you couldn’t do without it.

Forget singles, playlists, fireworks endings: April is a slow-flowing river, dense, full of bends, sometimes stopping to watch the ducks before moving on. Every track is a room to cross in bare feet: Lost Verses, The Light, Tonight the Sky — all different, all seared into your memory by that slightly broken voice and a kind of writing that manages to tell an entire world with a blurred photograph and a bottle half empty.

Some mention Neil Young among the tutelary deities — and sure, that works — but Kozelek seems more interested in building his own cathedral of silences than following any blueprint. And if Ghosts of the Great Highway was a love letter written in blood, and Tiny Cities an acid experiment based on Modest Mouse, April is a diary forgotten in the attic, filled with the loveliest thoughts and truest pains, never written to be read.

Then comes Moorestown, and everything stops: "“My thoughts will pause, my throat will swell / When her name is spoken…”" and so it goes, toward that corner of the world where love is a faded photo and the horizon is always just a bit too far away. Will Oldham appears like a gentle specter in Unlit Hallway and Like the River, and melancholy almost becomes a kind of relief.

No, I have no shame in declaring that April is on the same level as the best work by the Red House Painters and that, if there were any justice in art, Mark Kozelek would have the same spot in the sun as plenty of others less deserving. But that’s the way the world works: those who shout less, sell less. And besides, the man Kozelek often gets on people’s nerves — let’s not deny it — and he almost seems to relish it. And so he remains, patron saint of introverts, hammered into the pantheon of the misunderstood alongside Will Oldham and Mark Eitzel, in perfect company.

But every now and then, you close your eyes, press play on April, and feel time stop flowing. That’s not a small thing, these days.