Mark Kozelek opens his newest Sun Kil Moon album, a collaboration with Justin Broadrick working as Jesu, by saying "good morning" before taking us through a number of his days and nights. It's a romantic collection of songs, as well as a tender and sad one, but this time around Kozelek sounds less alone. Even when he has a full band, it can feel like he's playing a guitar by himself in a room, but Jesu/Sun Kil Moon comes off like a true collaboration. Broadrick and Kozelek are in fact longtime friends and admirers of each other’s work: Jesu’s 2009 album Opiate Sun was released on Kozelek’s Caldo Verde imprint; in 2013, Kozelek covered Godflesh’s "Like Rats" and a year later he mentioned Broadrick by name in his song, "The Possum."
Kozelek hasn't necessarily "gone metal" here, but he's definitely using his voice in different ways—he yells, he howls, he screams. The gentle guitar crunch and cymbal crashes seem to wake Kozelek up a bit, shaking him from the more soporific spoken patterns of his last couple of releases. And sometimes Broadrick's backdrop drowns out Kozelek, which offers a nice dynamic shift. His gorgeous arrangements of crunchy guitars, tender synthesizers, and soft drums are dotted by the voices of Will Oldham, Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock, the members of Low, and Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell, among others. And while the arrangements could stand alone on their own, there's still plenty of focus on Kozelek's lyrics. The words remain stream-of-consciousness, moving from the profound to the mundane and back, and Kozelek's still in the same emotional mode: He's facing mortality, and the mortality of everyone around him.
On the record, his songs often find him returning to the park outside his home, singing how hearing the children that play there makes him happy, and that he often writes his sad songs to those sounds. The references to these children become a kind of Greek chorus. There's the child he invites up on stage with him on "America's Most Wanted Mark Kozelek and John Dillinger." He tells us he sang while he "held her little hand," told her to stop eating sweets, and then chewed the gum he took from her ("it was sweet"). He sings, too, of kids shot at school and brings up the death of Nick Cave's son more than once ("The news hit me like a bus into a hill," he says, and at another time says it's something he thinks about daily). He also names an almost unbearably sad song about grieving parents after Mike Tyson's daughter, Exodus.
In that almost 10-minute track he reflects again on his cousin Carissa, his father's older brother Lenny who died young ("My dad looks down at the ground and gets quiet whenever I mention his name"), and author Danielle Steel losing her son at 19 to an overdose on heroin ("On his bedroom window still remains the sticker he put there/ The Misfits/ Every time I walk past her home on Washington Street/ I look up and I glance at it.") He talks, too, about watching the Mike Tyson documentary The Undisputed Truth, which inspires the song's chorus ("For all bereaved parents/ I send you my love"): "He spoke about the passing of his daughter Exodus and how he joined the bereaved parents group/ He knew when he arrived at her bed that he was not alone/ Because the parents of the other children embraced him and they cried together in the hospital room." It all adds up to the most painful song I've heard this year.
Other kids grow old and then die, and he sings about them, too. We get "Father's Day," in part about his 81-year-old father (he mentions, with a relief, that both he and his mother are still alive) and "Fragile," a song about Yes’ Chris Squire, who died of leukemia, which reminds Kozelek of a long-ago friend named Christopher, who also died of leukemia and is buried in the same graveyard where he and Kozelek used to drink Bud Light all day.
Kozelek's more recent output has obviously been vulnerable, but he feels especially open here—he’s not just making fun of himself, but also deeply dissecting why he makes fun of himself, and the sadness that’s hidden within a punchline. You almost forget what an asshole he’s been on stage and in interviews until, yes, he brings up those things, too. He turns the meta into the everyday.
The excellent eight-minute opener "Good Morning My Love" is based on someone telling their partner that they need to rekindle their love, and that person not knowing what that word "rekindle" means, but wanting/needing to find out. So much of Jesu/Sun Kil Moon has that kind of unexpected profundity. In an interview with Rainn Wilson that Kozelek did in conjunction with the record, he talked about shifting to his newer Sun Kil Moon mode after running out of metaphors. This is on full display here. (After all, the default chorus of "America's Most Wanted..." is "this is an account of the last few days," and there's truth in that advertising.)
The thing you realize listening to these songs, though, is that intimate details quickly take on the feel of metaphor. There's a profound weight, whether it's a middle-aged Kozelek telling his girlfriend how thankful he is to have her (which he does a few times), remembering listening to Hüsker Dü's Candy Apple Grey with a girl a long time ago, or talking about buying a bottle of water. In those water bottle moments, you wonder if he's thinking about spiritual or physical thirst, and realize that, for all of us, it's always a bit of both.
