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".
As usual, Kozelek's songs are inspired as much by places as by people-- or, perhaps, by places that let him contemplate the people who are no longer around. Mostly those places are in or near San Francisco: Half Moon Bay down the coast, Sam Wong Hotel in Chinatown, the intersection of Third and Seneca. Whether he's watching the city from his window or taking a long, lonely walk along the beach, he sketches out his surroundings in fleeting details, noting the reassuring presence of boats in the bay or gulls overhead before retreating deep into his own memory. "Oh, Catherine drifts again into my mind," he sings on "Sam Wong Hotel". "Freezing the tide, she visits me still." Despite some lyrical clichés and careless redundancies ("Come out from the burning flame" being the most glaring example), Kozelek's songs change mood fluidly, and the contrast between the serene settings and his own tumultuous thoughts raises even the most languid instrumental passages above mere aural wallpaper, lending it the gravity of his best work while giving it a character all its own.
Regardless of how it's credited, Admiral Fell Promises treats music as a retreat, allowing Kozelek to stand apart form the world and nurse his own disappointments. That safe haven, even more than his descriptive songwriting or eloquently downcast vocals, is crucial to his appeal, allowing the listener to slip into his perspectives, to see these vistas through his eyes, and to feel the ache of his regrets. For an artist who's notoriously difficult to pin down, that sense of refuge is remarkable, as is the fact that two decades into his career, Kozelek is still finding new inspirations.
