On the surface Matt Kivel’s tastes seem familiar enough. The Los Angeles songwriter draws from more or less the same pool of consensus folk and lo-fi influences as countless other indie acts from the last two decades, but there’s something vaguely contrarian about what he draws from them. To judge purely from his solo albums, he’s the type of guy who prefers “Night Falls on Hoboken” to “Autumn Sweater,” “Fillmore Jive” to “Silence Kit,” Mount Eerie to the Microphones, The Velvet Underground to The Velvet Underground & Nico. He finds more satisfaction in exploration than payoffs. His least favorite part of his favorite song is probably the hook.
Fires on the Plain is Kivel’s second album of 2016, and given how his records demand more time than most listeners will ever give it, he probably hasn’t done himself any favors by releasing it so soon after the last one. It’s a doozy, too, weighing in at 26 songs and 82 minutes—for those keeping score, that means Kivel’s released more than two hours of music this year, much of it so understated that it can’t help but blur together. Yet despite the similarities, Plain often plays less like a continuation of its predecessor Janus than a reaction against it, walking back that album’s comparatively tight, brightly colored compositions with Kivel’s most muted, unhurried treatments yet. There’s actually more going on this album than on any other Kivel release—more horns, more intricate guitar passages, more outside collaborators and guest voices—but because it all unfolds so leisurely over such a vast pan shot, it feels like his most minimalist work. This thing breathes.
It seems as if after three albums that barely sold, Kivel has given up on making music for anybody but himself, but Plain does feature a modest sales hook in the form of appearances from Will Oldham and Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold, who respectively duet with Kivel on a pair of woodsy, close-miked duets with complementary titles, “Forgiveness” and “Permanence.” That’s smart target marketing, because fans of both of those artists’ more patient work will find plenty to enjoy if they stick around for the rest of the album. It’s a sign, perhaps, of how different Kivel hears music that Plain is seriously backloaded, with most of its highlights tucked away after an unflashy, mostly uneventful opening stretch.
But what a pleasure it is when the album finally opens up. The terse guitars of “Black” deliver a shock of classic rock. “Other Shore,” Plain’s prettiest number, is a vulnerable bossa nova that’s sent off, in the spirit of “Walk on the Wild Side,” with a gust of saxophone. And then there’s “Whirlpool,” which with its dizzy, sticky riff may be the closest Kivel has ever come to writing a big-ticket indie song. His voice even rises to the occasion, too, swelling from a timid Ira Kaplan whisper to an emboldened Win Butler croon.
The Butler resemblance is strong enough that I can’t listen to that song without imagining how Arcade Fire might have played it—doubtlessly, they would have sold the shit out of it. Kivel, of course, doesn’t go that big. After spending enough time with these songs, it becomes clearer why he plays them so close. Fragments of a non-linear story emerge: a suicide, followed by grief and at least a few regretful benders. These are the kind of details you don’t shout to the world; you keep them to yourself. One of these songs is called “Light Depression,” and that title could also double as an apt genre tag for much of Fires on the Plain. Whenever the emotions threaten to become too vivid, the volume returns to a calming mummer as Kivel retreats, seeking safety in softness and quietude.
