Sun Kil Moon: Ghosts of the Great Highway : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

It's easy to compare Mark Kozelek to Neil Young, but the horse that Kozelek rides is much more sad and wild than it is crazy. As leader of the San Francisco gloom-rock combo Red House Painters, Kozelek made six albums of elegant English-major despair that you might expect to hear at Sylvia Plath's favorite coffee shop. With Sun Kil Moon, Kozelek remains as inscrutable as ever, but he avoids the archness that sometimes infected his earlier work. Six of the album's ten tracks run longer than five minutes -- "Duk Koo Kim," which elegizes a Korean boxer who died from injuries sustained in the ring in 1982, stretches to nearly fifteen. Kozelek's squalling dirges turn despair into a kind of elemental beauty. The autumnal, haunted tone reaches its peak in the album's best song, "Carry Me Ohio," a lament to lost love in which he searches for "the stars that I just don't see anymore." Kozelek seems in no danger of finding them, which is good news as long as it means he keeps making music this strong.

WILL DANA
(RS 936, November 27, 2003)