Song You Need to Know: Kurt Vile ‘Loading Zones’

The first new song this year from mordantly chill guitar hero Kurt Vile is at once mellow, weird, hilarious and transporting, offering more proof than he’s the closest thing our fallen age has to a Jerry Garcia. The loading zones referenced in the song’s title aren’t some metaphysical take-off point but literal loading zones, where he cunningly likes to park his car while doing daily errands so as to avoid paying parking tickets (“I park for free!” he boasts, like the world’s flyest gangsta of convenient laundry pickup). The layered guitar gorgeousness is insanely rich even by his high standard, a meld of languid gothic-folk fingerpicking, watery strumming and some weirdly soulful talkboxy wah-wah jive that suggests Joe Walsh by way of Future.