Sun Kil Moon - Disc of the day

Sun Kil Moon
Ghosts Of The Great Highway

(Jetset Records, 2003)

Mark Kozelek’s back! Time to revel again in his melancholy, Judas Priest-referencing resurrection.

In the publicity photograph for the new Sun Kil Moon album, the ravishing April (it’s streaming on their myspace page, for today only, if you want proof), Mark Kozelek is turned away from the camera, his face, barely visible, contemplating a spot on the ground just out of shot. A man evidently ill-suited to the conventions of the music industry, Kozelek has never followed the obvious path, choosing to spend much of his time after the demise of his band the Red House Painters recording only half-brilliant (though entirely fascinating) covers of Bon Scott era ACDC, John Denver and most recently Modest Mouse, instead of the kind stunning solo material glimpsed on 2000’s Rock N Roll Singer EP and most satisfyingly here on his first album as Sun Kil Moon from 2003. Finally searching his own soul again for inspiration, the resulting songs are breathtaking. There’s enough emotional depth in opener Glenn Tipton, for example, to fill a whole album by a lesser lyricist; comparing divided loyalties to Judas Priest’s guitarists with Cassius Clay and Sonny Liston, his similarities to his own father and a disastrous episode searching a teenage girlfriend’s bedroom. Memory is a recurring theme for Kozelek for whom reminiscence and melancholy are intrinsically linked and nothing is insignificant. May he never stop contemplating his navel.

Jenny Bulley

Posted by Danny_Eccleston at 6:00 AM GMT 22/03/2008