Kurt Vile Blows the Perfect Smoke Ring
Photo: Kurt Vile live in 2013 — photo by Christian Düringer, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
His 2011 breakthrough is a hazy, finger-picked daydream that turns restlessness into the warmest kind of comfort.
This is the record where Kurt Vile came into focus — or, at least, into the most beautiful kind of soft focus. The Philadelphia songwriter, an early member of The War on Drugs, trades a little of his lo-fi fog for warmer, clearer recordings built on dizzyingly intricate finger-picking.
“Songs don't build so much as drift — and you'll happily drift right along with them.”
Slacker, master
"Baby's Arms" opens on a gentle, circling guitar pattern and that unmistakable half-mumble — a voice that sounds like it's thinking out loud and doesn't much care if you're listening. "Jesus Fever" is the closest thing to a single, a bright, sticky tune about feeling like a ghost in your own life.
Nothing here is in a hurry. Throw on headphones and the layers reveal themselves: acoustic and electric lines tangling under the surface like vines on a porch rail.
The verdict
A record for long night drives and slow Sunday mornings, and the one that made Vile a defining guitar hero of the 2010s.
