SOUNDTRACK: KURT VILE-“Wakin on a Pretty Day” (2013).
I don’t really know that much about Kurt Vile. I’ve been hearing about him for a while. I assumed his name was a kind of joke–like he was a comical metal guy, maybe like Alice Cooper. That appears to be far from the truth. I also wasn’t sure if he was well-known outside of the Philly area, but I do know that NPR has championed him for a while.
Well, he has a new album out and since NPR was streaming it, what better time to hear what the long- haired dude is all about.
There is much talk bout his voice (NPR says: There’s something about Kurt Vile’s voice that transcends whatever comes out of his mouth.). But the whole time I listened to this song (which was a while, as it is over 9 minutes long), I kept thinking that he sounds just like the guy from House of Love, an underrated band here in the States. (He sounds even more like him in Kv Crimes”) It’s not necessarily a bad thing to sound like someone else (often times it can’t be helped I suppose), but it is a little distracting to me.
So this song is kind of groovy. I like it musically more than vocally (there’s so many “Yeah…yeah yeah yeahs” that I lost the point of the song). But the music is really good, including Vile’s lengthy guitar solos. Interestingly, I was kind of bored by the song after about 45 seconds, but by 8 minutes I was really grooving it. Subsequent listens have made me like it more, it has a kind of Neil Young or maybe Meat Puppets vibe.
My head says there’s really nothing special about this guy and yet after more and more listens, there’s something that draws me to him. Weird.
[READ: April 2, 2013] Love, An Index
The back of Lindenberg’s book explains that the man she loved, poet Craig Arnold, disappeared in a volcano while traveling in Japan. For such a very specific kind of event, I don’t think I would have gotten anything quite like that from these poems. Indeed, for a book that is so specifically created about this man, there’s very little sense of the exact nature of the loss. In some ways that’s good, it could have been a very maudlin, ungraceful collection of poems if she explicitly talked about volcanoes, but at the same time, the feeling of loss that comes across is less about death and more about abandonment (I would have presumed that the guy had left her).
I really enjoyed these poems even though I have a really hard time accepting the bulk of these, in particular the thirty-four page title poem, as poetry.
“Love, An Index” is thirty-four pages and it is an index. Literally, she lists words alphabetically and writes a little “definition” for each one. There are arbitrary line breaks in the definitions but in no way does it feel like a poem. Even the individual entries are not very poetic. Like “Compromise, I will get up early with you/so long as you’ve made coffee.” Okay, so that’s funny/sweet, but it’s not a poem. But then what it is? Yes, it is part of a greater whole and removing part of it diminishes that whole. But again, what is the whole? Genre defying I suppose. Which is cool. And despite my criticism, I really enjoyed this index. There were personal notes that I would have no idea about, there were commonplace ideas that are familiar to all. There’s also a ton of quotes from other poets. And it all works together to create a beautiful portrait of a relationship. (more…)
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I have been a fan of Courtney Barnett’s since I first saw her on a Tiny Desk Concert about 3 years ago. Bob and Robin from All Songs Considered have raved about her and her live show. I was really bummed to have found out about her last Philly show a little too late.
I Just Read About That... 