Sun Kil Moon
Ghosts of the Great Highway

"The desperate know the elementary truth of life, which is its continuous, wavy, trembling force of change, up to that extreme and unknowable end that is death, of which only one thing is certain: it will change us"

A quiet desperation. This is the thin, fragile, and intensely subtle thread that indissolubly binds the ten tracks of this "Ghosts of the Great Highway." And the voice is that unmistakable, childlike, and sullen tone of the great Mark Kozelek. This album "is" Mark Kozelek, it is all his poetics. A poetics of the fragile, of the unstable, of a compass that points to all and no direction. A compass with a crazed needle in the absurd magnetic field between the poles of nothingness and possibility. And with the ice of happiness that you hear cracking at every moment under the uncertain steps of your life choices. And right from the acoustic snippets of the opener "Glen Tipton," what strikes in this album is the musical abyss carved into the soul by the underground currents of the absurd.

I buried my first victim when I was nineteen
Went through her bedroom and the pockets of her jeans
And found her letters that said so many things
That really hurt me bad

 "A desperate person is free, they have nothing to lose. Someone who has put their life on the line, and who draws energy from knowing it is fragile, precarious, threatened, suspended"

It is the hypnotic and trembling desperation that illuminates the fragile acoustic plea of "Floating", a moody and lunar ballad, with Mark's faint but bright voice, trembling like a candle burning out in the last darkness before dawn.

come to me my love
one more night come on
'cause i don't wanna be without
without you

Or the country-folk touches that calm a gentle lullaby like "Gentle Moon", where Mark's voice slips into its many imperfections, banana skins of hypnotic and tragically childlike notes.

all calendars pass, days die off
and hope cannot last
but if love was like stone, then yours was mine
through to my bones

Among the heavy electric riffs of "Salvador Sanchez" and the liquid psychedelia of "Lily and Parrots", Mark's voice flounders and struggles like someone who does not want to swim in the sea inside them. Someone who wants to drown and not be saved. An epic of the soul that sublimates in the fourteen long minutes of the monumental, heroic "Duk Koo Kim."

"A desperate person has control over their own life as much as it is empty. They can do whatever they want with it. They have no obligations, are dependent on no one, can clash with anyone, and launch an assault on any oppressive power, any authority."

And it is the wonderful "Carry Me Ohio" that is the masterpiece of the album. With that "Sorry" that chokes, almost crumpling within Mark's throat. That "Sorry" that falls into a sort of convulsive silence like a body shocked and battered in a grand mal seizure. More than six minutes lost in a sadly drugged pop atmosphere, with a tremendously erotic and hallucinated chorus, a sort of Lazarus-zombie walking, possessed by a musical force that is immense and without a reason.

can't count
to all the lovers i've burned through
so why do i still burn for you
i can't say

It's Mark Kozelek, simply.

[The quotes in this review are taken from Giuseppe Conte's book "Letter to the desperate about spring"]