It’s never a mistake to think long and hard about an album’s opening lines. Those on Admiral Fell Promises announce themselves with a forcefulness unequal to the gentle voice in which they’re sung: “No, this is not my guitar.” Of course, that line is only the introduction to the tale Mark Kozelek spins out from fragmented images on opener “Alesund,” but taken on its own, it’s a funny statement for a man with one of the most quickly identifiable playing styles in modern music. Maybe he’s referring to the little Spanish flourishes that bookend and sometimes interrupt the songs on Admiral. But while he seems like a musician with a wide range of influences (like the similarly globetrotting Ken Stringfellow), Kozelek is a case study in the ways that artists don’t change, really, they just get better.
For those who think that his prolific output (in the years since Red House Painters went on hiatus and he started his label Caldo Verde) means that he’s relying on sheer volume as a guarantor of his legacy, in the same way that Robert Pollard sometimes seems to be doing, know that the Sun Kil Moon moniker is something like his personal imprint, a promise of diligent arrangements and elaborate compositions. Admiral Fell Promises, the fourth under this name, is by far the most sparsely arranged, but to call it simply a guitar-and-voice album is misleading. There is a fullness to Kozelek’s singing and playing that often begs to be heard without a full band, and those elements are so often multi-tracked here that the result is some of his richest work. The production is so meticulous on “Alesund” and the title track, at times you’ll swear you’re hearing violins and cellos impossibly deep in the mix, as if only the reverb remains (maybe so, in fact).
The lyrics, on the other hand, are in a more miniature style than his epic evocations/invocations of America on 2003’s masterful Ghosts of the Great Highway (whose allusion to the boxer Sonny Liston on its opener “Glenn Tipton” smacked of a bit of Dylan-complex). Here, we get Kozelek more firmly in his comfort zone: flashes of poetic images, like a movie composed of black-and-white static shots that fade in and out to black. The results are rarely sappy, and never afraid to approach the banal, as on “Third and Seneca” with its “skinny girls and pudgy ugly dudes.” More typical are these lines from “Sam Wong Hotel”: “There by the blue, blue sea / On my morning walks / Seagulls dip and sway / Over mossy rocks.” If lyrics like these seem a bit blasé, that’s only because Kozelek works in a musical style that might be called “evocative extraordinaire,” and the images he provides are often only a supplement to the listener’s own. (Indeed, “Sam Wong Hotel” is almost impossibly lush and mournful and beautiful, and by extension swiftly evocative.)
In that way, some of these new songs return us in a small degree to the untouchable realm of “Katy Song,” the 1993 Red House Painters classic whose greatness I imagine must still haunt Kozelek. Never has a song so completely suggested the solace of a streetlight in the dark of night. Or that’s what I tend to hear. I mentioned before that Kozelek is a better artist than he used to be, and I think that’s true, musically speaking, but he’ll always be chasing an image as lonely and sustaining as those in “Katy Song”: the one found in the words (“Glass on the pavement under my shoe / Without you is all my life amounts to”) and the one found in that devastating guitar figure.
