A decade ago, it would have been hard to imagine Mark Kozelek's Sun Kil Moon as a project embroiled in online controversy. Since Red House Painters evolved into Sun Kil Moon in the early part of the last decade, almost everything about the latter band was low-key and under the radar. Kozelek often toured alone with his nylon-string acoustic guitar, his music was generally slow and quiet, and he released a great many records that were happily received by his cult and mostly ignored otherwise. But nothing about the band seemed keyed into the now or connected to the churn of digital culture.
All that changed in the last 18 months, for two reasons. One, Kozelek noticed that the stupid things he'd been prone to saying for many years (what has been described as a "sense of humor") could have a life outside the concert hall, from calling concertgoers "hillbillies" to picking fights with other bands. And two, in the last five years Kozelek's music has become diaristic in the extreme, which allows the mundane details of his life to enter his songs, lending them a bloggy quality. At times, these two streams came together in an ugly way, as when he wrote and released a single called "War on Drugs: Suck My Cock" and, more recently, when he disparaged a female journalist (and Pitchfork contributing editor) from the stage in London. The end result of these developments is that it's becoming increasingly difficult to imagine Sun Kil Moon's music outside of how it, and he, are discussed on social media. And since Mark Kozelek's music is so specifically autobiographical, and because he is the central character in each of these songs, it's doubly hard for his behavior not to have some impact.
Even setting all that aside, if Mark Kozelek had spent the last year and a half playing his music and—to reference a lesson he supposedly learned from his father in Benji's "I Love My Dad"—minding his own business, Universal Themes would still be a disappointing record. The songs are longer, the hooks are fewer, and the "then I did this, then I did that" observations are less profound and less likely to have you reflecting on your own life. It's ultimately a spotty album from a guy who has released a lot of spotty albums.
Universal Themes does have a certain amount of experimentation; some of it is almost proggy as it moves through sections and adds and removes textures while Kozelek plays with instrumental breakdowns. "With a Sort of Grace I Walked to the Bathroom to Cry", for example, pivots between spacious arpeggiated acoustic segments to what is more or less "hard rock," even if the latter is unconvincing. "Ali/Spinks 2" has a middle section of Sonic Youth-like guitar screeches that sounds a little out of place considering how relaxed and minimal the rest of the arrangement is. There's plenty of time to add these wrinkles: the eight songs average almost nine minutes each, and in a few of them you feel every second as it ticks by. Even so, a few tracks, despite their length, make no impression even after many listens. "Cry Me a River Williamsburg Sleeve Tattoo Blues" is a funny title in search of a song, while "This Is My First Day and I'm Indian and I Work at a Gas Station" is an unfunny title in search of a delete key.
Still, the fact is, no one else writes songs like this, and when everything clicks, Kozelek's music can still be moving. Opener "The Possum" uses an image of a wounded rodent as a jumping-off point for a meditation on life, death, friendship, and the beauty of the struggle through it all. "Garden of Lavender"—which really is, in part, about a garden where Kozelek is growing lavender—has some lovely guitar arrangements and manages to convey the ineffable feeling of time passing and living inside of a moment while also watching it happen from the outside. But these are exceptions. For the record as a whole, the fact that Kozelek is droning on in so much detail is more interesting than what he's actually saying. There are many, many words, but, unlike with Benji, they add up to very little.
Benji remains a one-off masterpiece because it's the place where Kozelek's rambling style cohered around a concept, the perfect meeting of content and form. The narrator of those songs seemed vulnerable, like he was risking something by putting it out there, and the stories of life and death were riveting in part because they seemed so familiar. It was a record of a particular time, place, and circumstance, and it was sonically as well as thematically coherent. It was also a record in large part about others, of Kozelek looking outward and trying to figure out what made people tick and what they cared about and what their lives meant, even if the answers weren't always clear. Here, there's nothing at stake. Universal Themes moves in the other direction, away from connection, and it pulls inward. It feels claustrophobic, a world drawing in on itself and getting smaller and smaller.
