Ian Benson
Editor-in-Chief
Mark Kozelek manages to cram more than 5,000 words, over 11 songs, on the latest Sun Kil Moon release, Benji, and they help to create one of the frankest albums in recent memory.
Kozelek has always been infamous for his prolific nature, reaching nearly 40 albums worth of material over 25 years, but Benji might be his most personal and challenging album. The production is sparse and the arrangements are dark and haunting. Most tracks are built around an acoustic guitar, but there are drums, bass and backing vocals to prevent the album from getting too monotonous. It’s a claustrophobic listen, and it isn’t designed for sunny, summer days. This album is meant to be played late at night, in empty rooms with the lights dimmed.
As with any of his releases, Kozelek’s lyrics take center stage, and on Benji he’s amazingly blunt for a man who has made a career out of confessional songs. The third track, “Truck Driver,” opens with Kozelek half talking over a fingerpicked guitar, saying, “My uncle died in a fire on his birthday.” From there, he lays out the story of his life, explaining how he was a truck driver who died when he caught on fire from an aerosol can explosion. Backing vocals eventually echo Kozelek’s voice and the melancholy becomes palpable. Looking at the lyrics, they look more like the start of short story than a song, but then Kozelek has never shied away from being verbose.
Oddly, this isn’t the only aerosol-related death on the album, because there was more than one aerosol-related death in Kozelek’s life. The first track, “Carissa,” recounts the life of his second cousin who died at age 35 when another can blew up. “What were the odds?” Kozelek asks mid song, the unanswered question creating a conversational tone that permeates the album. All of the songs are stories, and nearly all of them deal with death, and Kozelek’s delivery makes it feel as if he’s singing only to you.
Benji pulls off the admirable task of being both a deeply personal universal work. The album is set in Ohio, as Kozelek grew up in Massillon. He avoids portraying his family members as caricatures, using only fragmented imagery and anecdotal facts to make them seem more real. The songs resonate with the listener because we’re led to believe they’re all autobiographical, and we have little reason to think otherwise. Kozelek touches on other topics, such as the Newtown shooting and his jealousy of the success of his friend Ben Gibbard, with similar grim insights.
There are moments of sunshine that pepper the darkness. “I Love My Dad” is a dad-rock song about his father. Kozelek is remarkably genuine as he discusses the life lessons that he learned, and it’s sung with reverence despite some less — than — pleasant imagery where Kozelek may have outed himself as a recovering alcoholic and victim of abuse. It’s also clever, sounding a lot like a late-career Wilco song, and it even includes a mention of guitarist Nels Cline before Kozelek launches into a joke solo that doubles as a loving homage.
Benji is an album that holds nothing back, and when you make it to the other end, you wind up with a solid picture of Kozelek the human being, and not simply Kozelek the artist. He makes his pain into poetry, and he made that poetry into 2014’s first really great album.
