Instant Album Review: Sun Kil Moon – Admiral Fell Promises

Sun Kil Moon - Admiral Fell Promises

Editor’s Note: DeadJournalist.com welcomes our newest contributor, Moe Castro, to the fold with this album review. We’re damn glad to have him. You can follow Casto, the owner of Reason Y Records, on Twitter: reasonymoe .

Sun Kil Moon – Admiral Fell Promises (July 13, 2010)
by Moe Castro

“Hypnotic” is a word that often gets tossed around to describe Mark Kozelek’s music. Also, “somber. Even at his most ragged and raucous, there is a magnetic quality to his music, a haunting grace that blurs out the edges of your perception and lulls you into a trance. It simply draws you in.

On Admiral Fell Promises, his fourth album under the Sun Kil Moon moniker, Kozelek strikes a dark and delicate pose with 10 starkly unadorned songs steeped in loneliness and quiet resignation. Musically, it’s a long ways from the sprawling electric barn-burners that occupied much of Ghosts of the Great Highway and April, but thematically his familiar preoccupation with lost loves, solitude and death remains as strong as ever.

Accompanied solely by his nylon-string guitar, Kozelek seems every bit the man in retreat; a man resigned to living apart from the world, coolly observing, languishing in the exquisitely detailed portraits that make up his memories. Throughout it all, the mood remains thick with melancholy.

And, yet, for an album where everything seems cast in varying shades of gray, never once does it feel depressing or barren. Rich and evocative, this is an immersive album where when one song bleeds into the next and the aura of hushed intimacy never relents. It’s dreamy and sweetly mournful in a way that invokes rain-streaked fields and misty winter mornings. It’s the type of sadness you want to last, the sort of heartache you’ll want to wrap yourself in again and again.