Sun Kil Moon

Benji

Benji is the sixth studio album by American indie folk act Sun Kil Moon, released on 11 February 2014 on Caldo Verde Records. Self-produced by primary recording artist Mark Kozelek (of Red House Painters), the album shares its name with the 1974 film Benji, and was recorded between March and August 2013 at Hyde Street Studios in San Francisco, the album features contributions from Owen Ashworth, Jen Wood, Will Oldham, and Sonic Youth's Steve Shelley.

Now, enough with the formalities. If you are at all acquainted with the Red House Painters or Sun Kil Moon’s earlier albums you may have some idea what you’re in for here and you will. A bit but not really. Mike Kozelek is back with a kind of vengeance one is reluctant to exact and inevitably exchanges it with an intimate conversation over drinks and that’s exactly what this album is, over an hour long exchange of a weight being unburdened onto the listener. Endearingly masculine, tender and organic painting vast American landscapes I will never see with my own eyes. An hour of barefaced meandering honesty with the poetic prowess of Charles Bukowski, the breaks in the rhyming scheme seem both charmingly unpractised and cleverly crafted.

The countless recollection of events both personal and internationally known, from a second cousin’s funeral to the Anders Breivik shootings place the listener right in moment, you can smell the air, you can taste the green tea lingering, savoury in your mouth and you can recall the televised reports but the hysteria is numb. This is nostalgia made absolute accompanied by eerie harmonised guitar leads and close to spoken word, gravelly vocals, not your nostalgia, perhaps not even his nostalgia but our nostalgia.
This album explores a time line of the individual's human existence and experience from childhood memories of friends and family to very matter fact sexual encounters and ultimately (and often!) death. An unassuming yet powerful reflection on one’s own mortality.