Kurt Vile - God Is Saying This To You... (2009)

Kurt Vile has absorbed a lifetime's worth of 70s FM rock, and the ghosts of Springsteen and others glimmer under the surface of his woozy bedroom pop.

Sometimes an artist pens a song title that more perfectly captures his aesthetic in words than any review could. Thoughtfully, the War on Drugs' Kurt Vile has done this with his solo work via Constant Hitmaker's "Classic Rock in Spring/Freeway in Mind". See? Done. You know exactly how that should sound-- as nostalgic, wistful, and sunlit as the title suggests, with Vile crooning softly into a Jim James-sized cavern of reverb over some finger-picked chords about "riding on your Yellow Schwinn and blasting classic rock in spring." Those are some mighty big signifiers for a twentysomething kid to be throwing around, but Vile knows his way around them like they were living-room furniture.

Kurt Vile (real name, no gimmicks) has seemingly absorbed a lifetime's worth of FM rock, and the ghosts of Bruce Springsteen, Bob Seger, and others glimmer under the surface of his woozy, homemade bedroom pop. Vile recorded the majority of these songs on his own, and the sputter of the cheap drum software and the murmuring vocals testify to the kind of guy who doesn't want to wake up his parents upstairs. Nonetheless, even in this sleepy, abstracted form, there is no mistaking the widescreen Tom Pettyisms of "Freeway", from the wry hiccup of the vocal to the sunshower of jangling guitars that accompanies the track. Constant Hitmaker, his 2008 debut on Gulcher, snagged the ear of an attentive few, and now it is being reissued along with God Is Saying This To You, a limited edition LP, on vinyl. The sound of God Is Saying This To You is slightly cleaner and clearer than the bleary, sound effects-addled Constant Hitmaker, but that only means Vile sounds like he's singing from the bottom of a mineshaft this time instead of from the ocean floor. And it still feels like you're eavesdropping: Vile delivers every line in an amiable mumble, the sort of voice you use when you're humming something to yourself and only know every other word: "Hey girl, come on over, that'll be just fine. Two packs of red apples for the ride home," he murmurs over and over again on "Red Apples", and it sounds like the half-remembered chorus of some John Mellencamp song.

Vile has talked in interviews about his various odd jobs (he sings about operating a forklift on Constant Hitmaker) and his single, unfruitful semester in community college, and it rounds out the portrait suggested by his music: that of the talented but aimless kid in high school, the one who smoked pot every day but read philosophy textbooks in his free time, the sort of guy who identified viscerally with the borrowed blue-collar sentiments of classic rock radio. Kurt Vile channels this hangdog charm effortlessly, scrawling wayward little vocal melodies like the one on "Breathin Out" with the ease of a hesher Bob Pollard. Sections of Constant Hitmaker are bogged down with a few too many pedals-and-loops sound collages, but for most of the ride, Constant Hitmaker/God Is Saying This To You ambles dreamily along a perfect midway point between the disorientingly weird and the comfortingly familiar.