By JOSEPH VITALE
“Carissa burned to death last night in a freak accident fire,” Mark Kozelek sings on Benji’s opening track, “Carissa.” Mark Kozelek sings under the moniker Sun Kil Moon and his new LP visits (and re-visits) various themes — death among them — in an attempt to figure out the sometimes-haphazard, sometimes-mundane world around him. The undertaking is as cliché as it is ambitious, yet Benji sidesteps every and any convention of the process. The result is a fantastically detail-oriented and emotionally potent listen.
“Carissa” is inspired by Kolezek’s cousin Carissa’s death. He often sketches the events of his life that make him want to “find some poetry, to make some sense of this, to find a deeper meaning.” Kolezek’s songwriting articulates the process songwriters usually undergo behind the scenes. On Benji, the creative process is not edited out; it is built right into the song. “These things mark time and make us pause,” he sings about the death of Richard Ramirez, a West-Coast serial killer. “I ain’t one to pray, but I’m one to sing and play,” he croons in “Pray for Newtown.”
Kozelek is not afraid to tell stories too personal and stark for common comfort. The record ends up sounding more like a scribbled-in diary than a professionally edited memoir. His tales sound uncut, but not unfocused. Kozelek continually professes that things happen to all of us, and this is what happened to him, so how the hell is he supposed to make sense of it?
Most of the songs are played on nylon-string guitars, which are plucked and picked sweetly, smoothly coating the soft melodies carrying his atypical near-spoken vocals. There is additional instrumentation on some tracks (electric guitar on “Richard Ramirez Died Today of Natural Causes,” saxophone and tambourine on “Ben’s My Friend”) which adds dimension to the otherwise folk-rock vibe of the album. But, Kozelek’s varying strings are the album’s true instrumental staple.
Almost all 11 tracks read like pieces of captivating fiction. They are the kind of tales that grab your attention and squeeze it relentlessly. They are songs for a long train ride, with the outside world whizzing by in all of its arbitrary and bewildering messiness.
In the end, Benji is an ode to what it means to feel, reflect on and question the human experience. It is akin to reading some philosophical work but skipping to the real-world examples. Kolezek does not seem to have any more answers than he does questions. Then again, neither do we. Why pretend it is any other way?
Joseph Vitale is Managing Editor at The Fordham Ram. You can follow at him on Twitter at https://twitter.com/_joevitale.
