Kevin Morby
Sundowner DEAD OCEANS. CD/DL/LP Singer-songwriter reflects on dying of the light with sixth solo album. For an album made on home ground, Sundowner often sounds painfully adrift. Written on a garden-shed 4-track after Kevin Morby left Los Angeles to return to his native Kansas City, the followup to 2019’s Oh My God is steeped in loss and confusion, bearings jammed by bad dreams, worse luck and the same hallucinatory wobble as 2016’s Singing Saw. “You will not outrun the burn,” he sings on the pleading Don’t Underestimate Midwest American Sun and, despite his writing’s steady assurance, these are songs touched by grim reckonings, from the roadkill of Provisions to A Night At The Little Los Angeles, pushing the sky away with clammy Bad Seeds visions. Campfire and Jamie honour lost friends more starkly, but even without explicit elegies, there’s a sense Morby is permanently watching something sink into the horizon, suspending what’s left in beautiful songwriting amber. Victoria Segal