Sun Kil Moon has been developing his own style in the genre of the singer songwriter over his past four albums and his last three could almost be seen as a trilogy. Benji was a nostalgic masterpiece that looked back on lead singer/guitarist Mark Kozelek’s life in a mix of joy and sorrow with a forward facing honesty that hit home on many counts. Then the album Universal Themes brought the same style of honest story telling the current day with diary like detail. Now on his latest entitled Common As Light And Love Are Red Valleys Of Blood Kozelek has blended both the past and the present together in more detail. We spend a lot of this album inside his head as it goes to some uplifting and unsettling places.

The Highway Song is a great example of this. Boiled down the song is about his thoughts whilst driving around with the A B structure almost working as two separate songs. The opening A structure deals with immediate thoughts that he experiences as he sees things from his car before it reminds him of his fascination with Murder and Serial Killers which then become the B section. These sections are explained with a detail of the crime with a police report accuracy. This Structure creates a dark and occasionally uncomfortable piece of music but an intriguing one that’s worth listening to.

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This week I got to see Sun Kil Moon live at the RNCM in Manchester. Mark Kozeleck may get more press now for his outspoken attitude then his music but what can’t be denied is his talents as a lyricist and persona onstage. He oozed a confidence that only comes from years of live performance and over 2 hours took the audience through a history of his work in ways that were fresh and captivating. Keeping me on edge with a constant element of uncertainty and anarchism.

His previous album Benji was my album of the year and I have waxed lyrical about it on this blog before. With his newest album Universal Themes, Mark Kozeleck has taken his unique lyrical style of stripping away metaphor and simile from his songs and applied it to modern, almost immediate experiences. This Diary like style is applied across all elements of the album from its composition to its arrangement. It is hit and miss but when it does hit it packs a punch of brutal honesty that manages to summarise the experience of human existence unparalleled in any music I have heard before.

When I first heard Birds of films I was shocked by one verse. The song tracks his experience on the set of a film in switzerland and manges to cover both the mundane and the remarkable. But when he talks about his experiences of taking a woman out to a bar one evening, and flirting with the idea of cheating on his girlfriend before deciding against it. I felt like I was intruding on something too personal to be out there for public consumption.

Yet It’s these moments in all his work that show a mirror up to our existence. They show the fragility of our emotions and the randomness of our experiences. This isn’t an exaggeration of what it is to be a human like most music, It’s the truth and I find that captivating.

The fact that I can write so much about Mark Kozeleck’s work is a clear indication of what I think about him. He’s a true artist, someone who has found their own niche in folk and rock music, and over his career has developed it in new and varied directions. He’s flawed and has his weaknesses that may come across badly in some articles about him but these are the imperfections of being human. They are part of who he is and how he expresses himself and when he does that through music it can lead to the most personal musical experiences I have ever heard: