Kurt Vile has a persona, and you know him by now: He is the weird quiet kid in the corner, the one who seems at first lost in his own world and disconnected from everything around him, but turns out to be smart, observant, and low-key hilarious. So while his albums draw you in with the vibe—the impeccably recorded and mixed songs that shuffle bits of folk, new wave, or country in the mix but are always squarely down-the-middle rock—you return to them for their human qualities, the way they offer a manner of seeing the world, a glimpse at a perspective that feels both voyeuristic and easy to connect to your own life.
You have to feel for Vile when he does early interviews for one of his records and he’s asked to characterize them. Music writers look for a story, an angle, a hook, and he gamely tries to give them one, a reason why an upcoming record is different from his last few. In the case of b’lieve i’m goin down, he pointed out that it was darker, an album from the night, written in the lonely quiet hours after his wife and two children had gone to sleep. (My favorite quote on this came from his interview with Rolling Stone: "It’s definitely got that night vibe…KV’s Night Life—it’s my sequel to Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly"). But Vile’s albums mostly vary in smaller details; they are collections of songs that generally draw from a similar handful of influences, and Vile’s style as a guitarist, songwriter, and especially a vocalist keep them relatively uniform. His arc so far has been a process of refinement, of gradually figuring out settings in which the songs work best.
On b’lieve i’m goin down, that means he’s incorporated a bit of banjo and a bit more piano and has eased off just slightly on the reverb. The essential quality of his music is no different, but the banjo picking draws out a bit of folkiness, and piano shifts things slightly from capital-R Rock to singer-songwriter territory. But many of these songs could have just as easily been found on either of his last two full-lengths, which in his case is not a bad thing.
Something that has changed over the years is that Vile has grown steadily funnier, and his lyrics have grown more sophisticated. Humor was always part of his music, but on b’lieve i’m goin down it’s an animating principle. Lines like "When I go out I take pills to take the edge off or to just take a chillax, forget about it/ Just another certified badass out for a night on the town" scan as goofy on the page, but in the context of the arrangement of "That’s Life, tho (almost hate to say)" they become something else entirely. The song is a dark, doom-laden thing, with fingerpicked guitar out of "Can’t Find My Way Home" and a bleak undercurrent of synth, something in the realm of Nick Drake in "Black Eyed Dog" mode. In this setting, Vile’s tossed-off musings, where punchlines alternate with striking imagery ("I hang glide into the valley of ashes"), remind you that every sage worth a damn knew that life was absurdly funny and tragic simultaneously.
The quotable lines are many. It’s been a while since I heard a description of a hangover as evocative as "A headache like a ShopVac coughing dust bunnies"; "I’m an Outlaw"’s banjo accompaniment might make you think of a folk ballad, but Vile’s outlaw is like one you’ve never seen, one "on the brink of self-implosion, alone in a crowd on the corner, in my Walkman in a snow globe going nowhere slow." "Pretty Pimpin" describes a moment of existential confusion in front of the bathroom mirror, with Vile brushing a stranger’s teeth before realizing "they were my teeth, and I was weightless"—whoops. "Lost my Head there" has a piano riff like the theme from an early '80s sitcom, but played a step too slow, like you’re about to watch the usual ridiculous "Three’s Company"-style misunderstanding happening in drug-induced slow motion. But then it turns out to be a tune about its own creation, and Vile’s description forever colors how you hear it: "I was buggin’ out about a couple-two-three things/ Picked up my microphone and started to sing/ I was feeling worse, than the words come out/ Fell on some keys and then this song walked out."
As compelling as Vile’s words can be, much of the magic lies in his delivery. Like Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen, and Bob Dylan, Vile’s singing voice has acquired an unstable accent of indeterminate origin that shifts to suit his musical decisions, rather than connecting to genre or region or even his own upbringing. Most often, he’s got a nasally twang unlike that of any other native Philadelphian, and it helps his low-key murmur cut through the wooly mid-tempo haze. That twang makes his music feel more grounded and conversational, and there’s also a bit of a "Hey, it’s me again" quality the first time you hear it on a new album, an aural watermark that never leaves you any doubt that you are listening to a Kurt Vile record.
Vile’s signature qualifier is "I guess…"—the phrase shows up frequently in his songs. It’s easy to believe he’s never quite sure of what he’s seeing or exactly how he’s feeling. Vile’s version of reality is always slightly confused, a blurry approximation of what’s out there, one in a state of constant revision. This could strike some as lazy, like he can’t be bothered to whittle the blunt stick of his music down to a fine point, and it’s this perpetually fuzzy quality that leads people to label Vile a spaced-out stoner. But from another angle the uncertainty feels honest, an acknowledgement that a great deal of life involves making it up as you go along. Or as Vile puts it on "Dust Bunnies", "There ain’t no manual to our minds, we’re always looking, baby, all the time."
Vile now plays "rock" in the most '70s sense of the word—album oriented, guitar solo-friendly, very much about long-haired dudes sitting in a room playing instruments. That he’s hitting his peak as an artist at a time when rock music of the type he practices is falling out of favor and is becoming just another genre instead of the center of the musical universe only adds to his appeal; this is not an artist concerned with being in step. Vile’s relevance to the music world at large rises and falls, but he keeps plowing ahead, secure in the knowledge that in an examined life there will always be more to explore, another bleary morning with another unfamiliar face looking back at you over the bathroom sink.
