Artist bio

See also: Red House Painters

Sun Kil Moon is led by Red House Painters frontman Mark Kozelek, and the group's 2003 Jetset debut, Ghosts Of The Great Highway featured contributions from RHP drummer Anthony Koustos and bassist Jerry Vessel.

Albums by this artist

Ghosts Of The Great Highway (2003)

Interviews

Ghost Stories
December 29, 2003

Sun Kil Moon

Ghosts Of The Great Highway

---

» JONATHAN COHEN | SENIOR EDITOR

Sun Kil Moon Ghosts Of The Great Highway Jetset, 2003 RiYL: Red House Painters, Neil Young, Nick Drake, Elliott Smith

Our favorite music is tied to so many different criteria, be it the actual "sound" of the material, the way a given song can instantly revive precious memories or how a random lyric can be open to so many different interpretations. Few artists quietly offer that complete package as well as Red House Painters frontman Mark Kozelek, and Kozelek himself has rarely worked in such masterful strokes than on Ghosts Of The Great Highway, his first album under the Sun Kil Moon moniker.

His recent sabbatical from Red House Painters found him dabbling almost exclusively in acoustic reinterpretations of AC/DC songs, turning the bawdy originals into bewilderingly unrecognizable new entities. Ghosts fittingly opens, then, with the largely acoustic "Glenn Tipton," a paean to simple pleasures like Kozelek's favorite donut shop and late-night cable movies, but zinged with the unseemly undertones of the artist's trademark frank revelations about his love life: "I buried my first victim when I was 19 / went through her bedroom and the pockets of her jeans."

The unedited access one gets into Kozelek's psyche has always made his work compelling, but there's something intangible about the honesty of the material here that sets it even farther apart. On the heartbreaking "Carry Me Ohio," Kozelek pines for the "warm canals and pools clear blue" of his Buckeye state childhood and pleads "heal her soul," as if tapping into a happier time to relieve his crushing emotional insecurity ("can't count all the lovers I've burned through / so why do I still burn for you?").

Musically, Ghosts boasts some of the most arresting compositions of Kozelek's career. The 14-minute epic "Duk Koo Kim" is mesmerizing, drawing all the air out of the room like a phantom, while "Gentle Moon" blends campfire ambience with tear-stained string accompaniment. The urgent "Salvador Sanchez" wields welcome classic rock crunch, but is versatile enough to be recast as the playful acoustic number "Pancho Villa," which closes the album.

Kozelek is also experimenting more than ever with different vocal approaches, and wrings maximum emotional impact when hitting his highest register on "Duk Koo Kim," "Sanchez" and "Tipton." And while the earliest Red House Painters albums froze Kozelek's reluctant confessionals in spartan atmospheres, the music here feels more human than ever: bruised, utterly sincere and born of the relentless truths of real life.

JONATHAN COHEN | Jonathan Cohen co-created Nude As The News with his Indiana University mates Troy Carpenter and Ben French. When not traversing the globe for business and pleasure, he holds down the fort as a senior editor for Billboard in New York. Stop him and he just may ask, "what for lunch?"