Over the last two decades, Mark Kozelek has showcased both his rich baritone and even richer knack for songwriting to great success. His latest body of work, Benji, is the sixth release under his Sun Kil Moon moniker, and might go down as a landmark moment in an already adored back catalog.
Not only does it set the bar for his contemporaries this year, it also circles, underlines and highlights just how good he can be. Although Benji isn’t a concept album, it is built strongly upon two core themes — loss and memories. On their own, both provide plenty of strong material, but it’s when they dance together and integrate that the record reaches its highest highs and most emotional lows. Despite being named after a family film about a dog hero, a lot of the content on Benji is sincerely dark, melancholic and just downright sad. Kozelek reflects on such things as his personal history of romantic relationships, dysfunctional family dynamics, deaths of relatives and victims of mass shootings. It is at points severely downbeat and sombre but in the most earnest and detailed way. Hearing him talk about how he never got the chance to know his second cousin, “Carissa”, or pondering the hardships of sorting through his mother’s belongings when she eventually dies cuts through the speaker and goes straight to the heart. It’s both confessional and cleansing to have Kozelek paint these vivid pictures with his words, and gives the impression that this album has been forged from thoughts and feelings he’s had weighing on his mind for some time.
It’s not all darkness and gloom, though — far from it. Despite having a pretty opaque center to it, there are moments of enlightened relief which help break up the heaviness of tone. There are declarations of love and playful confessions of sibling-like rivalry in the humorous, off-the-cuff closer, “Ben is my Friend”, a song dedicated to the relationship between Kozelek and fellow musician Ben Gibbard (of Death Cab for Cutie and The Postal Service fame). The music follows suit, and if anything, actually leads the charge for balancing the scales somewhat.
Although anchored by bass-centric chords and vocals, Sun Kil Moon injects a series of flowing and uplifting musical changes throughout. Whether they be simple key changes, upper scale picking complete with tempo shifts or searing echoed melodies, the low key americana on display here gives more than enough light to make your way to the end of the tunnel. It might be a bit redundant to say this is my favorite record of the year so far, considering we’re only a handful of weeks into 2014, but it is. It’s raw, honest, openhearted and the sweeping ebb and flow of its instrumentation make for a truly fantastic listen, one that sits atop my personal mountain to show the rest of 2014 what to aim for.
