Minimalism isn't a word you'd think to apply to Mark Kozelek's fifth album as Sun Kil Moon: As noted in our interview with the man last week, it's 17-songs-long (plus a five-song bonus disc with alt and live versions of album tracks), and boasts titles such as "I Know It's Pathetic But That Was the Greatest Night of My Life", "The Moderately Talented Yet Attractive Young Woman vs. the Exceptionally Talented Yet Not So Attractive Middle Aged Man", and "Not Much Rhymes With Everything's Awesome at All Times". Among the Leaves is the opposite of the emo navel-gazing session that those titles might imply, but in terms of sheer volume and loquacity, the record certainly feels like the work of a songwriter clearing his palate: It's a fairly cathartic, sprawling creative outpouring.
In terms of paring back, though, the deluge is executed with minimum musical verbosity: Sun Kil Moon's last album, Admiral Fell Promises, featured just Kozelek playing nylon-stringed guitar in a Spanish-influenced fingerpicked style, and it's much the same here, save for a handful of songs where he's backed by a small ensemble-- banjo, violin, light drums. The Spanish flourishes are condensed to an occasional trill and the odd bout of dramatic inflection (the tremulous waltz of "The Winery"), with Kozelek embracing the genre by being less the flamboyant and romantic artist presenting small and considered masterpieces; more an observer content to sit back on warm, dusty street corners, casually chronicling what he sees (or imagines) and throwing in oblique personal reflections from his 20-plus years as a songwriter.
In Stephen Deusner's review of Admiral Fell Promises, he wrote that the split between Sun Kil Moon and Mark Kozelek is "a way to document the complex lives of his songs, which are never quite finished but always hold the potential for rebirth and transformation." At their sparsest and least lyrical, the songs here are all finished in a sense, even when Kozelek openly sings about how he thinks certain efforts could be better ("It's a chore to write half a dozen/ Some guys lay back and rest on their laurels like lazy old hacks/ Well I wrote this one and I know it ain't great," he admits on "Track Number 8"). However, the casualness and immediacy of his recollections (a homeless girl outside his door, watching cats in the street), and the repetitive nature of much of the playing, indicates that he hasn't worked much of the material up a great deal. "King Fish" is the only song here performed on electric guitar, swaying pendulum-like with a dour heft that recalls the absorbing, weighty tone of Ghosts of the Great Highway, yet its relatively basic way with transition and lack of development over its near-seven-minute duration (there's a little closed-eye, loping-head guitar jam toward the end, that's about it) again makes it seem fairly unadulterated.
This lack of formality and sense of true "finishedness" may well feel frustrating, whether you preferred the bittersweet fullness of Ghosts or the compact, elegant sculptures of Admiral Fell Promises, perhaps the two furthest removed cornerstones of Sun Kil Moon's releases to date. Certainly, some of the songs here, particularly towards the end-- the record clocks in at 73 minutes-- feel a little lazy or unnecessary. Kozelek's main way of increasing the drama or tension of a wiry, rankled song like "That Bird Has a Broken Wing" is to raise and layer his voice, a trope that gets a bit tired after a while. There are plenty of moments of graceful, serene beauty, however, that pull their weight as part of such a large body. The dry stroke of "Young Love" feels forlornly romantic; the title track could easily be the theme to a cerebral family drama, such is its quintessentially warm, accepting tone (and sweetly syrupy violin); the song with the ridiculously long title bows and sparkles like birds hopping on a telephone wire in the wind.
Deusner posed a question in his review of Admiral Fell Promises: "What makes a Mark Kozelek solo album different from a Sun Kil Moon album?" While the mostly solo Among the Leaves really serves only to muddy any answer to that question, it poses another: What's Kozelek gunning for on this record? It's uncompromisingly long, but often courtly and sweet, the kind of familiar furniture that feels as though it could easily soundtrack a beautiful moment. He's rancorous about touring and how much he hates London ("UK Blues"), and magnanimous whether singing about the woman he loves ("Track Number 8"), women he's cheated on ("That Bird Has a Broken Wing"), women who have stalked him around the world ("I Know It's Pathetic"), or died and broken his heart (he names the subject of "Katy Song" on "UK Blues", and her presence hovers elsewhere).
The lyrics are uncharacteristically jokey in parts: the "guys in tennis shoes" who replaced the hot girls who once made up Red House Painters' audiences on standout song "Sunshine in Chicago"; citing a crowd member in Ireland who moaned that he hadn't had such a bad time at the show since seeing Bill Callahan ("UK Blues 2"). There's little poetry or affect to the words, which are concerned with fairly straight storytelling about Kozelek's personal and impersonal relationships rather than anything particularly lyrical. Overall, you get the impression he isn't really trying that hard, that bettering his bests isn't a notion that interests him, 20 years after the release of Red House Painters' debut album. He's the kind of talented songwriter that can mostly pull that off; though for a record so spare and simple, Among the Leaves comes off as strangely confrontational.
