Kurt Vile’s time is slippery. Mondays melt unnoticed into Saturdays. The sun rises, sets again, then it all flows bassackwards. His lengthy records give the impression of a series of sunlit days, half-remembered in a haze. But if listening to Vile’s music can make one acutely aware of the transience of all things, the man at the center of these songs does not always seem conscious of this truth. He lives from moment to moment—often the moment of his songs’ creation, which he likes to narrate out loud, describing his writing process and shouting out his influences. He’s deeply self-aware, and if his new album-length EP, Back to Moon Beach, at first seems like a continuation of this thematic and sonic mindset, he has a ready-made response to anyone hoping for a mid-career switcheroo: “These recycled riffs ain’t goin’ anywhere anytime soon,” he sings on the title track.
Back to Moon Beach consists largely of gold-hued guitar jams with simple chord progressions and generous runtimes. One of the first lyrics on opener “Another good year for the roses” is “These days I do whatever I want,” and Moon Beach at first seems like a commitment to this credo. The songs are filled with slacker hedges like “man” and “whatever.” Sometimes he won’t bother to write any words if a “woo” suffices. The title track suggests that “Moon Beach” is the mental landscape he escapes to while making music, and its distance from the daily grind seems aligned with idioms like “head in the clouds.”
And yet the Vile character seems less content, less satisfied, less serene on these songs than on any he’s written since 2011’s Smoke Ring For My Halo. Some kind of dissatisfaction has set in, and it’s not so easy to just play it away. “Cup runneth over with lifeblood/Then it sprung a leak,” he sings on “Touched something (caught a virus),” before complaining about a migraine. “Like a wounded bird trying to fly” centers on a simile apparently written by his daughter Awilda. “Always did I love that line/But never did I apply it to myself ’til just then,” he sings. On “Blues come for some,” the sumptuous layers of guitar fall away, and we hear Vile alone at a piano, confessing: “Blues came to me in my dreams/And it stayed.” The cause of Vile’s blues is often ambiguous, though “Tom Petty’s gone (but tell him i asked for him)” suggests one answer. Vile wonders aloud what he might have said to late musicians Tom Petty or David Berman had he known them, before concluding that he might not have found anything to say: Bob Dylan is still alive, after all, and if Vile met him in person, he’d “melt down like a nuclear reactor.”
