Mark Kozelek with Ben Boye and Jim White 2: Review
is a long running and prolific American singer-songwriter who fronted Red House Painters in the 90's and continues to front Sun Kil Moon to this day. He has released music increasingly frequently since 2016 and dropped two full length records last year, with even more potentially on the horizon this year. This is a sequel to his collaboration with Ben Boye and Jim White from 2017.
Review By Lavender:
My love for Mark Kozelek's music is no secret, just last month I listed two Sun Kil Moon records, 2014's Benji and 2016's Common As Light And Love Are Red Valleys Of Blood on my best albums of the decade list. And last year Mark's collaboration with Petra Haden of The Decemberists fame landed in the top 15 of my favorite albums of the year. I don't really consider the first in this series among Mark's best work but I was excited for the sequel nonetheless. With more indulgent songwriting than ever before and a continued insistence on stripped back instrumentals the records packs moments of beauty and introspection, just not an hour and fifteen minutes worth.
The album is seven tracks and just under 80 minutes to each song is a serious investment but when it pays off, it pays off in spades. The opening track Walkin In Auckland is the shortest at about eight and a half minutes but ultimately turned out to be one of the more memorable tracks. The majority of the song sees Mark telling stories about journeying around Auckland while on tour over a somber piano led instrumental. The track does have its moments where it speeds up and Mark gets into a faster more spoken tone. In the end of the track he quickly stops to roast Bradley Cooper in a line that made me laugh out loud and throw it back to how fantastic New Zealand's spring water is. The second song LaGuardia is also quite good as it sees Mark opening up with a really funny story about straight up lying to some kids who are Mumford And Sons fans. He tells a story that I don't believe is real about walking out of a friends apartment and staying in a hotel because he had no privacy. After some instrumental changes he discusses the Leaving Neverland documentary and throws it back to his own song He's Bad from all the way back in 2017 on the second collaborative Jesu record. He closes the track on a really interesting anecdote regarding his relationship with Jeff Buckley and despite never really being that big a fan of Buckley I thought the story was pretty fascinating.
The record has more good songs to come but it gets worse before it gets better. The third song is called The Artist and if you're wondering why its called that it is literally in reference to somebody who makes a sandwich so good Mark calls them an artist. Later in the song he makes friends with an Uber driver who has some views as boomer as his own about people never looking up from their phones. The song actually gets a lot better from there and Mark provides his own backing harmony vocals which I always enjoy, but I definitely don't see this song as being worth the 11 minutes. The worst track of the bunch is Chard Enchilada which is another entry into a long running line of Mark's songs that are really silly and this one is particularly difficult to get through. Mark muses on what it would be like to be an enchilada and how tough it would be, before transitioning into an impossibly long musing on the bassoon and how difficult a life bassoonists have. The monotony is briefly interrupted by a bassoon solo that is actually pretty jamming, before it shoots itself one final time as Mark discusses how hard it would be to be a dog in Scotland because it rains a lot.
The record closes off on a pretty good trilogy of tracks starting with My Brother Loves Seagulls which features one of the more beautiful instrumentals on the record. The song is predominately a story of Mark's brother going to the hospital with nausea and the suspense in the track is real and impactful. I love around the halfway point when the instrumentation suddenly becomes to much fuller and evokes some of Mark's most introspective and meaningful musings on the entire song, a good track. Where's Gilroy? is the next song and it's the longest at almost 16 minutes. It has some sweet callback moments to Sun Kil Moon history as Mark talks in detail about how he practices guitar. He does at one point ask where the song is going and as a listener I feel that, there is definitely some wandering going on here. He mimics the chorus of a song he heard on TV that reminds him of Rush for the records cringiest moment, but the song gets much better from here. He talks about mass shootings for much of this track which is a subject he has brought up a number of times before. His points about how dissociated we all are to the horrors are gritty and real and his point about gun violence being a long running facet of america's gun obsession is something I totally agree with, plus he dishes out some Joe Biden slams which I'm always here for.
The final track August Night is one that is really worth hearing for yourself and I won't be spoiling some of the most intimate emotional moments of the track. There are moments where Mark is reminiscing about how few TV channels there were when he was a kid and at one point he breaks the fourth wall and talks about the backing vocals he provides to his own songs. The only complaint I have about the track is how frequently it changes topics but there are still a number of the albums strongest statements here.
Round two of this collaboration is about on par, or maybe a little bit behind with the first one. I find myself with a complaint I don't frequently dish out to Mark's records despite the fact that they are all pretty lengthy, but too many of the songs feel like they get their point across long before their runtime concludes and it makes me wonder if there was some magic number Mark set out to hit for this record. Despite more filler than usual ultimately there is still so much of what I have always loved about Mark's music here and this is another record that fans of his output shouldn't miss. 6.5/10
or my review of the latest Sun Kil Moon record here
