#238 — Kurt Vile — Smoke Ring For My Halo (2011)
Through the haze, something appears.
You ever wonder what Elliot Smith would have created if he hadn’t died?When we were teenagers, me and my friends thought Kurt Cobain would have been making country albums by the millennium, in the style of Johnny Cash.
I mention these names because Kurt Vile’s album has an almost audible ancestral line running through all three of them.
I must confess, I had to take an extra day with this one. I went through it twice at work, another time at home, and yet I couldn’t get a grip on what it was. The smoke ring was unreachable, but I knew there was something good going on here.
This is a hazy album it’s a vaguely dreamlike pondering of life and places in a slow, but never plodding, vocal style which gives a lot of early nineties indie-rock, grunge. It feels like a half-asleep thought, which isn’t a criticism. An album for headphones, for 3am when you have to turn the music right down because it somehow sounds far too loud.
There’s a snarl to this, but it’s a snarl that can’t be bothered to rise to anger.
Vile’s a guitarist, and I’m not aware of his other bands or work, and he definitely lets the guitar do the talking on this album. Not in a soloist way, but in a painters way — I was hesitate to say sonic-landscapes, because that implies something more grandiose and strutting. This album doesn’t strut.
It walks, it stumbles. It goes around in gentle circles and nudges into things. It makes you close your eyes and soak it in, until you’re surrounded by it. I think it’d be a great album to get ridiculously high to.
Kurt Vile — Smoke Ring For My Halo — 2011
Best Track: “Puppet to the Man” is that line-walking indie-rock disgust with yourself, the world, and everything else.
Underrated Banger: This album doesn’t have underrated track, it’s a smooth consistent quality of guitar and vocal work.
