Album Review: Sun Kil Moon - I Also Want to Die in New Orleans

Mark Kozelek, the man behind Sun Kil Moon, has had an incredibly long, productive career in folk music, and shows no signs of slowing considering his recent habit of releasing at least one album per year. One might expect that schedule to negatively affect the records' quality, but fret not; no matter how much time the 52-year-old Mark were to spend on them, they would probably still turn out terrible. His latest work, bizarrely titled in reference to the $uicideboy$ album from last year I Want to Die in New Orleans, is about as mindless as the genre can get; no attempts at wordplay or creativity, just a stream of consciousness over rudimentary guitar playing.

Considering how ripe the political climate is for commentary, a folk album from a seasoned veteran musing on modern issues should practically write itself, yet the only point Mark has continuously reinforced over his past few efforts is his status as a bitter, prideful man who has nothing of worth to add to the conversation. Day in America opens with the bluntest discussion of the Sandy Hook shooting and gun laws ever recorded, and fails to last long enough to reach any sort of point before descending into a nonsense debate between Mark and his band members over whether the piece they played improv over was or was not a Bill Evans number. Mind-numbing is an understatement: his brain is addled after so many years of recording his ramblings that he actually believes his ideas are worth hearing.

The closest he ever gets to a worthwhile observation is I'm Not Laughing At You, an interesting dissection of other countries' view of America especially in the Trump era, though it soon devolves into a jingoistic back-and-forth with an Englishman to the tune of 'we made Lou Reed' and 'yeah, but we made David Bowie'. It is almost a cleverly made point; followed, of course, by a rant about how technology is ruining the world and all the gadgets responsible were invented by "nerds". Mark's bygone success has only further inflated his ego, and all his words are as vain and vacuous as one would expect from a misogynistic curmudgeon.

Is there even any musical worth to this album? Occasionally it throws out an interesting melody, such as with the saxophone section near the end of Cows, and it is at least somewhat less bare-bones than most of Mark's recent work. But any merit to be gathered from such creative moments is slowly siphoned out over the course of the ridiculously long track lengths; all but one reaching at least ten minutes and the closer, Bay of Kotor, stretching to over twenty. Mark is no stranger to this structuring, as his albums have only gotten longer and more drawn out as time went on (peaking with 2017's Common as Light and Love Are Red Valleys of Blood, which clocks in at over two hours); still, it does those records no favours, and it certainly doesn't make this one any more bearable.

Speaking of the last track, this lengthy opus is a culmination of everything that makes Mark such a terrible writer, such that it is impossible to identify a worst moment. In contention would likely be: his imitation of a kitten's needy meowing, his insistence to working-class maids that his life is just as hard as theirs because he has to spend a lot of time in airports, and his laughably terrible words for a stray dog: "Bite my hand all you want, keep me company for a while/Your bites are nothing compared to the sick feeling I suffer every time I turn on American TV news channels". At one point, he describes someone calling him nothing more than a machine, for once an accurate observation: Mark inputs benign experiences and outputs aimless ramblings on top of dull folk music.

I Also Want to Die in New Orleans is the pinnacle of the egotistical ramblings Mark Kozelek will, in all likelihood, continue to subject the world to until he is no longer physically able to utter any more bullshit. As certain as one can be that this album is as devoid of worth as the rest of his recent works (if not more so), listeners can be equally assured that next year's endeavor will probably somehow top this in terms of pointlessness. At least this one has a cute cat on its cover.

1/10
Favourite Tracks: nope