Kurt Vile - Smoke Ring For My Halo

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5...according to our Business Lady on Wed 21 Dec, 2011.

Celebration time kids. It's time for a new Kurt Vile rekkid! Upping the ante significantly since his last outing on Matador ('Childish Prodigy') 'Smoke Ring For My Halo' is chocker with instantly enjoyable material. This is only my second spin of the LP and I already feel very much at home with the music presented here. Vile's sound brings to mind so many artists (some of which are mentioned in the press release and some not) whilst somehow maintaining an stylistic independence that should see him hailed as one of the great indie rock songwriters of our time. He's got that 'too kool for school' vocal delivery that merges the lyrical wit of Dylan with the loose drawl of Tom Petty and the emotional poignancy of say Leonard Cohen. Unlike previous LPs 'Smoke Ring...' is predominantly laid back material that oozes the kinda confidence you'd expect from an artist ten years his senior. It's also worth noting that his guitar playing is exceptional throughout. Tracks like the atmospheric 'Baby's Arm', the lushly produced 'Runner Ups' and the almost 80s Fleetwood Mac-style 'Society Is My Friend' will no doubt see Vile placed up there with the greats. He's like Neil Young or Bruce Springsteen or one of them fellers. Amazing.

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Kurt Vile has a way of tying time in knots. You can hear it on his new album ‘Smoke Ring For My Halo’ from the get-go – the pinwheeling guitars and reaching atmospheres of ‘Baby’s Arms’ are as strange as they are familiar: a demonstration of how Kurt can put worn methods and sounds through himself and end up with something that isn’t emotionally or sonically obvious. Instead we’re left with a record that contains traces of the past but doesn’t waste precious time in the now being reverent.

Once compared to Leonard Cohen, Tom Petty, Psychic TV and Animal Collective in the same review, Kurt can bring to mind anything from Suicide to Leo Kottke to My Bloody Valentine, Bob Seger, Nick Drake and Eastern ragas. Still, he pieces together these disparate elements so seamlessly and unpretentiously that such reference points are rendered pointless by the singularity of his sound. Kurt Vile might belong to a long lineage of classic American songwriters, but he’s the only one who’s alive and in his prime today.

This is the fourth time Kurt Vile has put an album’s worth of songs together and stuck a name on it, but in a sense ‘Smoke Ring For My Halo’ is his first real album - every flinching guitar arpeggio and vocal wander was made to be here, made with this record in mind, to sit alongside another in situ and in sequence. It’s a record that is perfect for any given day during whatever season, to satisfy all moods in every possible scenario, be that first thing in the morning or last thing at night; today, tomorrow or five years from now.

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