An album as good as Ghosts of the Great Highway should never go out of print. But the world's not a fair place, as our parents constantly remind us. In the interval between the album's original street date in 2003 and its deluxe reissue in 2007-- a relatively short span for a reissue-- Sun Kil Moon's former label, Jetset Records, let the album fall into limbo. During that same interval, however, frontman Mark Kozelek started his own boutique label, Caldo Verde, which has already produced a handful of releases, including Sun Kil Moon's notorious Modest Mouse covers album and Kozelek's Little Drummer Boy Live. Considering these factors, this reissue seems almost inevitable, an act of survival instead of a mere moneymaker or legacygrabber.
Ghosts continues-- even fine-tunes-- the work Kozelek did with his former band, the Red House Painters. These songs are virtuously stoic Americana-- all shimmery guitars, measured tempos, malevolent moods, and wandering melodies. His voice, then as now, sounds like Neil Young's, especially in the effortlessness with which he hits the high notes then returns to a lower, earthier texture. But Kozelek possesses a steady imperturbability that Young, with his soul-music background, eschewed. As the title suggests, Ghosts is a travelogue of sorts, speeding through the Midwest and the West; in this sense, it's the male equivalent to Lucinda Williams' Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, especially in the imperfect mirroring of physical terrain and emotional geography. Bruised masculinity is the album's central theme, however, evident in odes to boxers, matadors, serial killers, and musicians, all of whom inhabit the same lonely stretch of road.
The album opens with "Glenn Tipton", a nod to the Judas Priest guitarist. That the song is finally revealed to be delivered from the point of view of a serial killer is a quiet shock: Kozelek's carefully detailed songwriting makes the narrator not just familiar, but sympathetic. The revelation takes the song away from the confessional and into the raconteurish, where the album remains for nine more uniformly strong tracks. Tying everything together is a trilogy about dead boxers, beginning with "Salvador Sanchez" and ending with "Pancho Villa". In the middle is the 14-minute "Duk Koo Kim", which sprawls furtively for several rounds, its guitars bobbing and weaving gracefully and noisily (the song's subject necessarily conjures Warren Zevon's "Boom Boom Mancini", about the boxer who killed Kim in the ring). Kozelek approaches these pugilists-- and all his characters-- like he's Raymond Carver, parsing the details until he finds the one that makes them real.
Typically, it's the musical details that do just that. The band Kozelek assembled for Ghosts-- Anthony Koutsos (Red House Painters), Tim Mooney (American Music Club), and Geoff Stanfield (Black Lab), along with a few guests-- ably but subtly bolster his lyrics and vocals, generating a steady clip that never flags. Tempos rarely vary between or even within songs, and the guitars find a spectral riff and settle down with it, repeating it with gentle relentlessness that needles the characters and refracts the melodies. The result is an album as hypnotic as highway divider lines whizzing past.
Neglecting demos or earlier works, the six-track bonus EP is notable mostly for showing how easily Kozelek translated these songs from electric to acoustic settings. These alternate or radio readings of "Carry Me Ohio", "Salvador Sanchez", and "Gentle Moon" aren't too far removed from their originals, despite having only Kozelek's voice in common. This testifies to the flexibility of his songwriting and the adaptability of his performances, and yet it all adds up to a pretty lackluster EP, offering no specific insight into the songs' development before or after the album. The remaining bonus tracks consist of an unreleased instrumental similar to "Sí, Paloma" and two versions of the same Leonard Bernstein cover. Fortunately, Kozelek has better luck with "Somewhere" than with any of Isaac Brock's tunes, transforming it from a staged number into a despairing ballad... twice. They're the twin highlights of a skippable EP, but that mild disappointment is considerably assuaged by the fact that Ghosts is back in print.
