“Hunchback”
from the album Childish Prodigy
2009
iTunes
With Childish Prodigy, his debut for indie-juggernaut Matador, Kurt Vile stretches and pulls the increasingly annoying “lo-fi” tag into interesting new shapes, distancing himself from his Woodsist-kin, who seem content to blanket their pop-punk and folk with sheets of tape hiss. Instead, Vile creates dense layers of texture, lo-fidelity only in the sense that the sounds refuse easy pop categorization, echoing and blending endlessly, blurring the lines between his reverb-soaked vocals and the intricate web of keys, guitars, trumpets, and clattering percussion buzzing and twitching underneath them. In a lot of ways, it’s reminiscent in approach of another “lo-fi” landmark, The Microphones’ seminal album The Glow Pt. 2, which a production pal of mine once lauded as “a ‘lo-fi’ record for hi-fi headphones.”
Vile splits his time between the road-trip pop of Constant Hitmaker and God is Saying This to You, the AM-radio classic rockisms of his other band, the War on Drugs, and the blues-boogie of his recent EP with backing band the Violators. Tellingly, members of the Violators and War on Drugs are present, amping up the VU/Stooges-homage “Hunchback,“ which finds Vile howling and testifying about fish drowning out of water over a strutting, fuzzed riff, his vocals careening into red with snarling menace. “Monkey” finds the band playing it arena-rock stately; it’s the kind of tune that someone like Pete Yorn would kill to write, but whose scrub-and-shine methods would rob the song of personality. It’s a chord progression epic enough to work for U2, but Vile and co. play it like they’re The Jesus and Mary Chain.
Vile indulges his acoustic, finger-picking folk side on “Blackberry Song,” with a gentle, shuffling melody showcasing that, no matter how he adorns his songs in noise and masking, his core remains rooted in rustic-Americana. “Your blackberries grow so wild/ Pick the best ones off the bush,” he sings with guilelessness. “Inside Lookin’ Out,” featuring little more than a stomping kick drum, shaker, and multi-tracked vocals, roars with its refrain, “I got the blues so bad/my feet don’t walk,” a blaring harmonica reminding us that Bruce Springsteen was trying to do Suicide when he made Nebraska.
“Goodbye Freaks” ends the record, and it’s a telling track to end with. The sweeping, phased drum-machine tones are some of the brightest on the record, and the shimmering synths and oh-so-slight saxophone and trumpet flourishes gently suggest melody rather than aggressively state one. Vile doesn’t sing a single line on the song, instead exploring vast instrumental vistas. It’s a bold trick for a singer/songwriter to pull, but just the sort of thing that sets Vile apart from the flock, a faded vision of a white guy with an acoustic guitar who is somehow never boring, never sinks to gentrified sterility, and never ceases to surprise.