Pitchfork

Drug abuse, jealousy, bloated egos, alcoholism, and sleeping with a band member's girl, are among the numerous inglorious reasons that many a rock and roll band has decided to call it quits. However, among this ignoble collection of excuses, not one reason has dispassionately slain as many of your favorite rockers, and been called out with more misguided sincerity than the proclamation of "artistic differences;" otherwise known as the reason Rob Zombie has a solo career. The most continuously baffling aspect of what I will dub, for the purposes of this review, "Rob Zombie Syndrome", is that nine times out of ten these "differences" only lead an artist to embark on a solo venture where they make music that sounds, for all intents and purposes, exactly the same as the music they had performed with their previous band. Thing is, most of the time this material is bereft of all the frenetic energy and inspiration of their prior group.

In light of this gloomy context, Sun Kil Moon, the new solo project from Red House Painters virtuoso Mark Kozelek, can be understood as a miraculous unforeseen godsend for his listening audience. Instead of the album simply serving as a coda to all of Kozelek's previous incarnations, this new batch of material displays him putting to use a variety of wondrous subtle sonic touches that mark unbelievable artistic growth, unraveling unexplored harmonic territory while staying faithful to his trademark brand of languid folk-rock introspection.

With Sun Kil Moon, whose members include fellow Red House Painters cohort Anthony Koutsos on drums, American Music Club's Tim Mooney (also on drums), and ex-Black Lab bassist Geoff Stanfield, Kozelek has finally taken the time to fully indulge his own artistic vision. For instance, all of the numbers on Ghosts of the Great Highway are Kozelek originals; in other words, no more AC/DC covers! Furthermore, it seems that, for the first time, Kozelek has put out an album whose meticulous sequencing yields more than just a random scattershot collection of great songs, but rather a complete cohesive musical statement.

Ghost of the Great Highway is the sonic equivalent of a tightly woven patchwork quilt, a sprawling aesthetic manifesto overflowing with empathy, warmth, nostalgia, and an intensely resigned anger and yearning to reclaim those who time has taken. The album's wistful opener, "Glenn Tipton", serves as a testament to this desire to recover the most modest of moments from one's past. In the song, Kozelek reminisces about debating over boxing legends ("Cassius Clay was hit more than Sonny Liston") and Judas Priest guitarists ("Some like K.K. Downing and some Glenn Tipton"), while mirroring these discussions to memories of his own dad watching Clark Gable movies on TV.

On the stately Neil Young-influenced rocker "Salvador Sanchez", Kozelek tells the story of Sanchez, a boxer who died in a fatal car accident at 23; whose story is told, yet again, on the acoustic string-laden stomp of the album's closure, "Pancho Villa". The effect of this repeated conflation of iconic ghosts from the past with Kozelek's own personal narratives is remarkably moving. All sense of time and stability are lost; Ghost of the Great Highway comes to symbolize the mechanics of actual memories, where people, places, discussions, events, and disarmingly ordinary and average moments are jumbled longingly together with little sense of any historic time-line outside of one's own experiences.

While Kozelek's albums with the Red House Painters never seemed quite colorful enough to sustain for their entire 70-odd-minute lengths, Ghosts of the Great Highway wholeheartedly avoids this same grim fate. The record achieves this vibrancy largely through balancing Kozelek's retrospective vocals, and penchant for acoustic and electric guitar noodling, with dazzlingly exotic arrangements, and inspirationally subtle instrumentation. On the blissfully tender "Gentle Moon", the calming strum of acoustic guitars is blanketed within the shimmer of a brilliant electric guitar melody, all the while twinkling xylophone notes sparkle and luscious sweeping strings color Kozelek's frail tenor. While on the obligatory 14-minute psych-rock epic, "Duk Koo Kim", a fuzzy pensive electric guitar motif gives way to the valiant insistent strums of an army of mandolins, only to be draped by a rainstorm of solitary acoustic guitar notes.

Sun Kil Moon's Ghost of the Great Highway is a modest win for great music everywhere: it is the triumphant sound of an industry underdog finally making good on his past potential, and consequently demanding some long unappreciated due. The fact that it wasn't with Red House Painters is an irony that only makes this victory of an album that much sweeter.