Send "Sun Kil Moon " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 This is an odd question to be asking in 2010, after he has spent nearly 20 years making music: What makes a Mark Kozelek solo album different from a Sun Kil Moon album? For most of the 2000s, the distinction was more than just words on a jewel-case spine, as he debuted new material under the Sun Kil Moon banner and then reinterpreted it in live or demo settings as a solo artist. Musically, it always sounded like a matter of electric versus acoustic, full-band versus solo guitar, jammy versus intimate. It's the two sides of a man who has turned himself into a cottage industry through his Caldo Verde label, releasing scores of companion EPs and limited-edition live LPs that keep his old songs alive. But the split between Sun Kil Moon and Kozelek has never come across as merely a sales gimmick. Instead, it's a way to document the complex lives of his songs, which are never quite finished but always hold the potential for rebirth and transformation.With Admiral Fell Promises, his fourth LP as Sun Kil Moon, Kozelek has flipped the script. Instead of downcast Crazy Horse epics like Ghosts of the Great Highway and April-- albums rich with electric tones, roomy arrangements, and landscape-painting lyrics-- this is literally a solo record: just Kozelek alone with a nylon-string guitar. Furthermore, the title track dates all the way back to 2001's White Christmas Live, released under his own name. So this stands as an anomaly within his catalog, not only for its artist credit but also for its music, which finds him wandering into new territory and entertaining new ideas. On this site last May, Kozelek said he'd been listening to a lot of classical guitar music, specifically name-checking Kaki King and Croatian musician Ana Vidovic. They seem to be the primary inspiration for Admiral Fell Promises, which showcases a classical picking style rather than his usual strumming. Kozelek's playing is supple and nuanced, swift in its fingerings and hypnotic in its repetitions of riffs and phrases. Despite the Nordic muse of the title, opener "Ålesund" possesses a flamenco intensity, as Kozelek adds fluttering fills to the main themes, and on "Australian Winter", he creates an ominous repeating rhythm that plays up the restless tension of the lyrics. If the instrumental codas that cap almost every song become a bit predictable, this style fits his songwriting well, allowing him to punctuate the short verses of "Half Moon Bay" with sympathetic filigrees of sound and to create hidden coves on closer "Bay of Skulls"....full text |
| Treblezine |
| An affinity for letting loose and rocking out isn't necessarily the first quality one might associate with Mark Kozelek's music, but a fair amount of the Bay Area singer-songwriter's work since 1996 has been marked by frequent employment of ragged, distorted guitars. Songs for a Blue Guitar was the first Red House Painters album that found Kozelek turning away from his earlier, dreamy slowcore compositions toward alternately lilting folk and raucous barn burners, a duality that has made his full-length efforts with Sun Kil Moon some of the most compelling albums of the past ten years. But Sun Kil Moon's third album of original material, Admiral Fell Promises, finds Kozelek putting aside the distortion pedals and the Marshall stacks in favor of a more stark and stripped down set that's as gorgeous as anything in Kozelek's 20 year discography. By opening the album with the line "No this is not my guitar, I'm bringing it to a friend," Kozelek invites the listener into an intimate space, offering candlelit serenades as haunting and beautiful as the black and white photo adorning the front cover. The song from which that line is pulled, "Alesund" begins the album with a series of gentle flamenco-inflected sweeps and plucks, slowly galloping toward an elegant waltz that starts the album off with a mesmerizing grace. And on "Half Moon Bay," there's a dreamlike quality to Kozelek's naming of places and memories, from the titular bay to the humming highway, which achieves an interesting sort of onomatopoeic effect as his rich baritone creates its own hypnotic hum. "Half Moon Bay" isn't alone in being a musical document of events, as it were, as the album is littered with place names — "Sam Wong Hotel," "Third And Seneca," "Bay of Skulls" — most of which evoke landmarks in Kozelek's native San Francisco. And as he sings lines such as "Catherine drifts again into my mind," that intimacy becomes even more pronounced, Kozelek inviting the listener deep into the recesses of his memories, which are triggered by these specific points on a map. But Kozelek's lyrics are so vivid and his storytelling uninhibited by extra layers of sound that one is easily held captive along the roads and corridors where his stories take us....full text |
| Slantmagazine |
| The distinction between Mark Kozelek's nominally solo output (see 2008's The Finally LP) and his work as/with Sun Kil Moon (see 2008's April), has always been tenuous: Whichever name Kozelek adopts for a given project, he can be counted on to deliver heartland melancholia via spartan folk and somber vocals. And with Admiral Fell Promises, he appears to have completely fused his two projects, affixing the Sun Kil Moon moniker to an album performed entirely solo, with no instrumentation beyond his nylon-string guitar. It's a fitting setup for a man who approaches solitude as both medium and subject matter ("I'm just moaning at the clouds/Wanting to be known/While I pass the lonely hours"). While an album of barebones arrangements follows logically from Kozelek's previous output, the idea will hardly appeal to listeners who find the singer-songwriter's preference for crawling tempos and stripped-down compositions wearying. Aside from their instrumental simplicity, the songs on Admiral Fell Promises evince a uniform disinterest in sudden mood shifts or redemptive finales. Like the black-and-white photograph that adorns its cover, the album is an exercise in evocative shading that embraces austerity as an aesthetic principle. The results are frequently stunning, and nothing testifies to Kozelek's skill as much as the fact that some of the album's most stirring performances are also it's longest. Give him seven minutes of your attention, and Kozelek repays with "Third and Seneca," a stop-starting rumination on the isolation of city life, and "The Leaning Tree," which begins as the record's brightest tune and ends as its most resigned. The album's ruminative dramas wouldn't be half so arresting, though, if they weren't complemented by some of the best guitar playing that Kozelek has put to record. The material here is far from flashy, but it's not exactly minimalist either. Kozelek's fingerpicked melodies are intricate and generous, and he's more likely to play an arpeggiated flamenco chord than to indulge in the type of plaintive strumming that characterizes lesser exercises in campfire folk. That's not to deny that the album contains moments where dullness or familiarity set it (it's even less dynamic, to be sure, than either of Sun Kil Moon's previous albums), but rather to underscore how surprisingly varied the performances turn out to be once their essential similarities are allowed for....full text |
Sun Kil Moon lyrics
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