Sun Kil Moon - Benji (2014)

Not only I listened to Benji several dozen of times, I also gave equally many attempts to start this note  - yes, this is how much I care. But I guess I owe something to an album I've played obsessively on repeat for weeks.

I first heard of Sun Kil Moon’s Mark Kozelek when I was in high school. Back then, he sang hauntingly beautiful, sad songs in the band Red House Painters, and because I was sad too, I spent a lot of my evenings listening to Down Colorful Hill and Rollercoaster. Kozelek’s lyrics has always been very introspective, and certain mix of loneliness, confusion and melancholy they represented made them easy to relate to. But“Things get heavier as you get older”, explains K. in the interview for Pitchfork. “At 47, I can’t write from the perspective of a 25-year-old anymore. My life has just changed too much, and my environment around me.”

The way Benji is narrated is exactly what strikes me the most. Most of Kozelek’s songs used to be covered in metaphors; here, instead, everything is much denser, heavier, and given straight away. Benji starts with the track about death of Carissa, singer’s cousin, and the deaths and sadness continue throughout the whole album. Each song is a story, starting from growing up in Ohio to mass shootings, fatal accidents of relatives and serial killers seen on TV. In fact, with lyrics written in a stream-of-consciousness form, Benji is an one hour long collection of memories, and although it is almost impossible to understand every single reference, Kozelek’s simple, repetition-based melodies are excellent even without knowing the context.

Not everything in here is perfect, though: some tracks are lengthy, some moments too meticulous. But, to be honest, I don’t know if I can say that I enjoy this album the way I usually enjoy albums. What I am sure of, though, is that Benji was not made for the kind of pleasure that comes from plainly enjoying the music; there is another concept in here that puts the extremely vivid, honest lyrics on the first place. At some point I found myself to wander from his memories to my own ones, and while catharsis is too much of a word, the ability to absorb me in complete melancholy is what makes Benji extraordinary - and is precisely what pushed me to listen to it over and over again.

Listen to Benji on grooveshark.