Matt Kivel's Double Exposure was a deeply solitary record. The lyrics brimmed with death, stillness, pale horses, and Kivel recorded it largely alone, away from his other projects, Gap Dream and Princeton. It was initially difficult to tell if anyone else even noticed this stark, beautiful little gem--it came out in late 2013, a tough time for indie records, especially ones by new, unproven names. I often wondered, living with it, if I was the only one listening.
Someone else must have been, because Kivel was picked up from Olde English Spelling Bee by Woodsist, and his follow-up, Days of Being Wild, arrives less than one year later. Kivel is touring with Steve Gunn and the Clientele now, and his new record reflects a modest new warmth. If the mood of Double Exposure was frozen and desolate, Days is rainy and melancholy. "Little Girls" even feels like a Clientele song, with its drizzly mix of acoustic and clean reverb'ed guitars. Kivel's lyrics are still whispered , but this time they are addressed to an intimate crowd rather than the corner wall.
The switch from acoustic to electric has a lovely lamplit effect on the songs. The chords and riffs make pleasant, friendly college-rock shapes, like the riff on "Insignificance", which feels like a watercolor made out of a Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain song, or the overdrive on "Open Road," which fizzes like a classic Yo La Tengo drone rocker. The power chords of "Blonde Boy", which Kivel barely articulates with the edge of his pick, feels like a Bachman-Turner Overdrive or Cars song creeping through a library on tiptoes.
Kivel seems to be making his muted version of a radio rock record, which is something you can hear in the lyrics as well. On "Insignificance," he whispers fragmented FM rock signifiers—"Black is night/ The highway/ Her nails so red and wild/ Green and slip/ The oceanside"—like Bob Seger via William Carlos Williams. On "Little Girls," he sings "Honey I ain't got forever/ You take me now or never/ Just step into the night/ There I'll be gone." On the title track, Kivel quotes the melody of Fine Young Cannibals' "She Drives Me Crazy", of all things. As with everything else, it's handled gently, cradled like a robin's egg. No one is actually being wild here per the album title, but the album is full of feeling for the memory of such days, the imprint they leave in the mind.
Kivel's voice is as much a warm shape and the guitars: As on Double Exposure, he's barely intelligible save for isolated phrases. Pieced together, these little snatches of clear communication convey almost as much, in their evocative settings, as the full lyric sheet does. One of them, from "Only With the Wine," is "She fucks with other guys/ But why?", and another, from "End of Adventure," is "Slapped on your ass." One of the welcome surprises of spending prolonged time with Kivel's music is discovering how quietly libidinous it is. Of course, another clear, ringing lyric piercing the haze is "I don't wanna die/ But I will." But compared with *Double Exposure'*s central confession "I want to kill myself" (from "Whip"), the line feels positively life-affirming. Kivel is still troubled by mortality, but on Days he is pushing away from it, towards life and contact.
