It’s been two years since the release of the beautifully acclaimed Smoke Ring For My Halo and now long haired, lo-fi singer-songwriter Kurt Vile has returned.
Vile’s fifth studio album Wakin’ On A Pretty Daze is a hazed out and dreamy welcome back for the former guitarist of indie band The War On Drugs.
The opening track – the (semi)title track ‘Wakin’ On A Pretty Day’ – introduces mellowing guitar chords into languid psychedelic slides that are drawn out into balmy twanging gestures.
The song strolls along to pacing drumming and Vile’s instantly recognisably understated and slacker styled vocals. Clocking in at nine and a half minutes the song seems to lose itself in the cloudy afternoon that is its own story and beautifully eases along to its new, self-established sense of elongated time.
Such is the overall theme of Wakin’ On A Pretty Daze. Tracks range from six to eight minutes, to the closer ‘Goldtone’ which revels in itself at a leisurely 10 and a half minutes long.
Far from self-indulgent and nowhere near decadent, the album effortlessly and nostalgically ambles along to Vile’s wispy vocals and myriad of finger-picked puzzles.
Vile floats into the occasional 90s soaked droning and distorted background and flirts with the use of soft analogue-inspired soundscapes.
‘Too Hard’ sees him stirringly taunt the listener: “I’ll promise not to smoke too much and promise not to party too hard,” whilst closer ‘Goldtone’ jeers on, proclaiming “Sometimes when I get in my zone / you’d think I was stoned / but I never as they say ‘touch that stuff’.”
Wakin’ On A Pretty Daze doesn’t prove remarkably different from Vile’s previous releases, but if it’s beautifully broke, why fix it?
