Review: Kurt Vile - Smoke Ring For My Halo

Artist: Kurt Vile
Title: Smoke Ring For My Halo
Format: Full-length
Year: 2011
Label: Matador
Genre: Pyschedelic bedroom pop
Rating: 78 / 100

Our long-haired, in his bedroom living, constant hitmaker being musician is back, and I was waiting for it. Being addicted to his 2008 album Constant Hitmaker, I was expecting a lot from this new Smoke Ring For My Halo. Expectations were pretty high, but Kurt Vile is able to make those high expectation come true. For those who never heard of Kurt Vile before, he is a in Philidelphia living musician, mostly known for his psychedelic sounding, bit lo-fi bedroom pop. It's pure, raw pop music made by someone who obviously fell in love with his room full of instruments. To be more precise, his music could be decribed as a mix between the indiepop of Liam Finn, the singer-songwriter of Bon Iver and some random psychedelic 60's band.

This album is full of tracks built up by a shitload of interfering individual tracks, often making it one big maze of melodies. On previous albums this was also present, but here he takes it a couple of steps further, surprisingly making it a bit poppier than Constant Hitmaker and Childish Prodigy, where single loops were often present during most of a song. This time he seems to have put more time into the overall songwriting of this album, making it a bit less Kurt Vile, but still a very enoyable piece of music. Kurt especially excels in his more acoustic oriented tracks like Baby's Arms and Peeping Tomboy, where he expresses his great talent to build up fairly complex little melodies on his guitar. Another point where Kurt Vile peeps out of the grey mass, is, whether you like it or not, his occasional use of dissonants in his tracks, not often being heard in modern pop music.

Being contemporary psychedelica in its finest form, Some Ring For My Halo really caught my attention again, just like his previous records, but it just misses that little bit of catchiness to really stand out, and become one of my personal favourites of this year. No problem, maybe it needs a couple of more spins before I will be screaming along and drowning in euphoria while listening.

Tea with honey is classic, spread the love,

Selwin.