The songs on So Outta Reach were technically written during the same sessions that brought us Smoke Ring for My Halo, Kurt Vile's still-resonant 2011 breakthrough, but the boundaries separating Vile's recordings, at this point, are growing irrelevant: His discography is starting to blur into one long, drawn-out sigh. Listening to hours of Kurt Vile, you get the impression that he once discovered the Neil Young lyric, "Though my problems are meaningless/ That don't make them go away" from "On the Beach", decided to lie down in it a while, and just never left.
Like other cultishly obsessive songwriters, however, Vile manages to repeat himself without strictly repeating himself. Images and phrases cycle through his lyrics like tumbling socks in a dryer-- he mumbles the phrase "two packs of red apples" on both "Red Apples" from 2009's God Is Saying This to You, and again on Halo's "Runner Ups". His releases often feature alternate versions of the same song, which happens here with "Life's a Beach" and "(so outta reach)", the second a faint echo of the first's muted shuffle. These are the sorts of subliminal tugs that map out the contours of a universe, and Vile has carefully built one with small tools-- his mutter, a bottomless cavern of reverb, and glimmering tangles of guitars-- and painted it a dozen shades of steel-blue and watery gray.
So Outta Reach, then, is a dispatch, another stop along a journey, and it's as good a place to tune into his frequency as any. "The Creature", the opening song, spins out another fragile variation on the wearily bemused blues he's perfected. His acoustic fingerpicking remains stunning, a narcotic blur of voicing that recalls his friend and former touring partner Jack Rose. Like Rose, or like early Elliott Smith, Vile's playing retunes your hearing to the limitless possibilities of the plain old acoustic guitar.
Fingerpicking is, of course, a skill acquired only through endless hours hunched over the guitar; it's no coincidence, perhaps, that Vile's lyrics speak overwhelmingly of friends lost, the dull pain of being left behind, and the sad savor of solitude. So Outta Reach includes a cover of Bruce Springsteen's "Downbound Train", blanketed in stoner-rock distortion, and its hard-luck, "now I work at a car wash," story folds seamlessly into Vile's landscape. But a careful study of his lyrics turns up little Zen-stoner nuggets of wisdom, like this one from "Life's a Beach": "Life's a while." The line reminds me of Chevy Chase advising that "a donut with no hole is a Danish" in Caddyshack, and suggests there's a sense of humor lurking beneath Vile's drooping curtain of hair.
Dependability is an unglamorous virtue to champion, yet at this point I reach for Vile's music like a glass of water. There's simple joy in the knowledge that falling for one Kurt Vile song practically ensures I will love a dozen others. I don't often find myself thinking about Vile when his music is not playing, but his music nurses a profound ache, and he's now made enough of it that it's become a whole corner to visit, a unique transmission that feels like its own sentient being. As an artist, it's hard to aim higher than that.
