“You know what I mean, and you know the way I roll” is the rather presumptuous line that ends Kurt Vile’s latest record, and damn it all, he’s right. Ten albums in, we know how he rolls: lackadaisical vocals, deceptively complex guitar lines, bluntly literal reflections on the mundane. There’s a cheeky sort of chiding inherent in closing an album that way, then. We know what a Kurt Vile album will be. Why would we want or expect him to do anything else? Anyone who comes to Philadelphia’s been good to me hoping for wild punk, earnest folk or hyper-modern indietronica will leave disappointed, but, as Vile pointed out, it would be odd to expect any of that from him at this point—especially on an album so clearly labeled as a celebration of “home.”
Philadelphia’s been good to me feels like the quintessential Kurt Vile record. When you close your eyes and imagine one of his songs, chances are it sounds something like the affable, warm title track. He long ago found his niche, and this record makes few attempts to push beyond it. “I’m treating [this record] like my last. I put everything into it,” he said in the initial album announcement. “It’s my most organic record, made in the comfort of my own zone.” But the album never feels stale or safe; an intentionality behind every choice turns Philadelphia into an ode to Vile’s stomping grounds, both stylistic and literal, not a mere rehashing of them.
“Smoke on my lip, I wrote a song, yeah / Some people said I was doin’ it wrong,” Vile tosses off—the record’s first words. “But check out my hands: my chimin’ chords / On a goldtone mandolin guitar.” The implication is clear: Just listen. How could something that sounds like this be wrong? It doesn’t read as a boast, though, but an affirmation of the validity of any form of songwriting, Vile’s easygoing guitar music included. It’s a rather convincing argument: “Zoom 97” is five minutes of loose, weirdo psych-rock with reverb-heavy “yip”s peppered throughout the mix like an odd form of syncopation. It grows on you fast and strong, building a home in some odd corner of your brain whether you want it there or not.
And Philadelphia’s been good to me is, at its core, a record about homes: literal, metaphorical, historical, spiritual. Kurt Vile loves his city, and he makes us love it, too. “Zoom 97” takes its name from zig-zagging “down Lincoln Drive.” The title track arrives halfway through the record carrying an infectious intimacy: “Philadelphia’s been good to me / Let’s hope it don’t fall into, well, the Schuylkill / That’s the river, always hard to spell / But it runs through my town and I ain’t puttin’ it down.” Vile playfully calls out artists who sing about cities they’re not from on the sweetly sentimental “You don’t know me cuz it’s my life,” telling them to come back to writing about Philly after they build a life there themselves. The finger-picked “Rock O’ Stone” may have been penned in Georgia, but a yearning for home echoes throughout its slow-burning melody: “Late September can’t come soon enough / Can practically taste them donuts on my tongue.” The home in “Every time I look at you” is Vile’s wife and daughters, as he sings about the “little spark ‘round the world from whence you walk / Now, watch my girls walk.”
Philadelphia’s been good to me is anchored in the geographical, but the album spends a lot of its runtime cataloging Vile’s love for making music. “99 BPM” is a pensive, celebratory tune about Vile’s early collaborations with the late Rob Laakso. “Chance to Bleed” makes a rollicking sonic thesis statement about Vile’s earlier records, the “old-time, lo-fi, DIY rock and roll” lauded in its chorus bleeding into the bones of the song itself, heralded forward by guest vocals from Greg Cartwright, Ethan Buckler, and Natalie Hoffman. “99th Song,” meanwhile, is a winding ten-minute Steve Reich turn that explains its own namesake partway through: “This is the 99th song / On my red looper / The last track that’s possible / Before the software explodes.” Fittingly, it’s made up of looping repetitions, keening and abstract, grooving subtly beneath Vile’s mumbled affections: “Playin’ late night to the wee hours of the day,” he talk-sings. “Stoned on music, well, the best kind of high.” Philadelphia may be Kurt Vile’s physical home, but music is his spiritual one, and he’s decided to invite the rest of us in. [Verve]
Casey Epstein-Gross is Associate Editor at Paste and is based in New York City. Follow her on X (@epsteingross) or email her at [email protected].
