Feel like going home
Philly’s wandering minstrel returns to his roots on epic ninth album. By Keith Cameron.
Kurt Vile ★★★★ (Watch My Moves) VERVE. CD/DL/LP
FOR ALL that he venerates blue-collar Philadelphia and his schooling in the city’s psychedelic underground, there’s big ambition lurking beneath Kurt Vile’s shaggy mane. Calling 2008’s debut album Constant
Hitmaker wasn’t wholly unserious. His most recent release, the Speed, Sound, Lonely KV EP saw him conjoined in arpeggiated twang and harmony with his hero John Prine; days after their recording session the pair performed together at the Grand Ole Opry. Vile has consistently aligned towards essentially traditional musical contexts.
Work on (Watch My Moves), his first LP since the Prine collaboration, was divided between Rob Schnapf’s LA studio and ‘OKV Central’, Vile’s newly-built home recording space, named in tribute to Tompall Glaser’s Nashville outlaw country hub ‘Hillbilly Central’. It boasts a console previously owned by Mitch Easter, whose work with R.E.M. and Pavement offers precedents for finding new connections to the past.
Vile’s recent albums – 2018’s
Bottle It In especially – have resembled sprawling assortments of emotional driftwood, made on the hoof around hectic tour schedules. Now, wanderlust curbed by global events, he palpably reconnects with his core sensibilities: Flyin’ (Like A Fast Train) has him “Playin’ in the music room in my underwear”. Amid the meditative phase tapestry Palace Of OKV In Reverse, Vile hails “Roots pulled back down in the ground”.
The freewheeling Kurt Vile still abides. (Watch My Moves)’ default rhythm remains the stoned circuitous amble: “When I walk I’m dreamin’, riding skateboards downhill,” he muses in Chazzy Don’t Mind, as Chastity Belt’s Julia Shapiro harmonises in approval. Like Exploding Stones, a seven-minute lope through the KV brain’s dustier crevices, is decorated with a synth line oddly adjacent to Foreigner’s Waiting For A Girl Like You, while some hallmark dissociative metacommentary (“Moog making noise now…”; “Guitars feeding back now”) undercuts the notion that Vile simply makes this stuff up as the tape rolls. The elementary-class piano tutorial Goin’ On A Plane Today – “Gonna chug a beer and curse my name” – has saxophone from Sun Ra Arkestra’s James Stewart, and invocation of Neil Young, a KV touchstone for following the artistic nose.
Vile could fill an entire album with such charmed vignettes, and complaining would feel churlish. Far better, though, he stiffens the record’s spine with a clutch of laser-crafted songs destined for the pantheon. The folkcountry lament Cool Water (“Just like Hank sang”) has a melody to make Nashville cats purr through their tears. Better still is Jesus On A Wire, where KV lends sympathetic ears to a woebegone messiah (“I wanna reach out to old Jesus/Tell him I, too, feel alone”) over iridescent guitar-picking, and also drops the first of two Dinosaur Jr allusions (“‘What a mess,’ I sing to myself, thinkin’ ’bout another song”). The second arrives in the opening line of Say The Word (“I wrote the words to this song driving from Philly to Amherst”; Vile produced the last Dino LP), a shiny blast of Rumours-vintage Fleetwood Mac choogle with on-point vocal detail from Cate Le Bon. The closing Stuffed Leopard nods to Bruce Springsteen (“I’m playin’ Candy’s Room”) among its pedal-steel cumulus waves, but Vile has already nailed his boss credentials with a cover of Born In The USA outtake Wages Of Sin, its domestic psychodrama prompting KV’s loneliest downbound train whistle. At one-and-a-quarter hours, (Watch My
Moves) is only five minutes shorter than Bottle It In, but feels much more happening. “I been doing this a long time, since before I was born,” KV winks to the crowd amid Fo Sho’s fuzzy electric boogie, “and it’s prolly gonna be another long song.” Constant hitmaker or beautiful waste of time: like all great alchemists, Kurt Vile proves you can be both.