The concept of samsara, one of the Buddha's four noble truths, holds that all beings are trapped in a self-perpetuating cycle of birth, death and rebirth. Fueled by internal struggle, we turn along an endless wheel of suffering, passing through untold lives in our never-ending quest for enlightenment. Some meditate upon this truth for years; Kurt Vile, on "Life's a Beach", nailed it for us in two mumbled words: "Life's awhile."
Vile's music has exuded this unique stoner-Yoda wisdom from the very beginning, even if you weren't searching for it. His sound-- warm, unhurried, and spacious-- doesn't demand close focus, but one of the joys of being pulled into Vile's lonely, contented universe is in discovering that he is muttering sharply self-aware things to himself. It adds another layer to Vile's appeal; seduced by the soothing, watery-blue glimmer of that sound, which promised to make you feel like the only human in the universe, you slowly realized there's actually one other guy here, and he's kind of a wiseass.
Wakin on a Pretty Daze is Vile's most spacious, becalmed record yet, and it contains some of his best-ever brand of cosmic stand-up. It opens, literally, with a stretch and a yawn: On the (almost) title track "Wakin on a Pretty Day", a wah'ed guitar rubs the grit out of its eyes while Vile beholds his furiously ringing phone with clinical detachment: "Phone ringing off the shelf/ I guess somebody has something they really wanna prove to us today," he notes. Unperturbed, he moves along, concerned with something far more pressing: "I gotta figure out what kind of wisecrack I'm gonna drop along the way -- today." The music quickens for a beat or two at this prospect, but settles back down. In Vile's universe, there is time enough for everything.
Accordingly, Wakin on a Pretty Daze moves at its own stately pace and with its own serene logic and time. Songs unfurl for six, or seven, or eight minutes without peaking dynamically or changing; the tangle of finger-picked guitars on "Was All Talk" queue up like synth presets that Vile just lets roll. On most songs, four or five chords cycle for minutes on end, echoing upward into the record's warm room tone. "Pure Pain" shifts between stomping, hard acoustic chording and two wide-open billowing finger-picked chords that simply hang while Vile muses: "Every time I look out my window/ All my emotions they are speeding/ Zip through the highways in my head." It can be occasionally frustrating to interact with a piece of music so fundamentally unconcerned with interaction, but like anything worth truly loving, Wakin on a Pretty Daze opens up slowly. The music, and the act of loving it, are exercises in patience. Or, as Vile puts it sagely on "Too Hard": "Take your time, so they say, and that's probably the best way to be."
Vile's releases are small variations on each other, and discerning the differences between them comes down to intangibles, things that are difficult to point to: The fact that he only yelps his little "Woo!" twice on "Shame Chamber" the first time around, for instance, indicating his bone-deep understanding that two "woos," for now, are plenty. Or the way the silvery guitar leads snake through the album without ever assuming the foreground, murmuring things that reward attention in the same way Vile's lyrics do. The way the drums nudge gently into the title refrain on "Girl Called Alex", and how Vile's "I wanna-" is abruptly cut off by a stinging guitar; these details, small by themselves, offer accumulated testimony to Vile's mastery of his world. Wakin on a Pretty Daze breezes past like a Klonopin dream, and radiates an easy confidence that is as rewarding to return to as a melody.
"Sometimes when I get in my zone, you'd think I was stoned, but I never as they say 'touch that stuff,' " Vile sings, with a hint of mockery, on Wakin's closer "Goldtone." The song is stunning, a desert island of Kurt Viledom. Ever since Vile signed to Matador, his music has grown warmer and more expansive as he receded further into the privacy of his own mind: On Smoke Ring for My Halo's "Ghost Town," he crooned gently, "I think I'm never gonna leave my couch again/ Cuz when I'm out, I'm only in my mind." "Goldtone," and all of Wakin on a Pretty Daze, feels like the culmination of Vile's quest to get away from people, noises, civilization and find somewhere to sit and whistle his own tune. If Kurt Vile could paint a storybook Heaven, it would look like "Goldtone", and he signs it with his most poetic, self-aware koan ever: "I might be adrift but I'm still alert/ Concentrate my hurt into a gold tone." A guitar pushes a wispy cirrus cloud across the sky, sea-blue chimes glitter, and Vile mumbles his way into the sunset.
