Kurt Vile Tries to Make Sense of the In-Betweens on Back to Moon Beach

Kurt Vile says Back to Moon Beach is an EP. But at 52 minutes in length, I might try to talk him off the ledge there. The 43-year-old Philadelphia crooner and shredder is always busy, whether he’s making albums with Courtney Barnett, singing with John Prine or cooking up expansive, brilliant LPs like Bottle It In and (watch my moves). Every year, Vile has got something for us to dig into. Back to Moon Beach is a big-portioned feast before 2023 concludes. I guess calling this album an EP makes sense, but only in the Kurt Vile universe—where most of his full-length releases clock in at longer than an hour anyways. Look at the tracklist of Back to Moon Beach and you might think it’s a bridge project or even a batch of throwaways, given that there are covers of Bob Dylan’s “Must Be Santa” and Wilco’s “Passenger Side,” but the work is just as potent as (watch my moves) was a year ago. I’d argue this is the version of Kurt Vile we’ve been longing for since B’lieve I’m Goin Down… came out in 2015.

I think about that run Vile was on in the mid-2010s, when he put out Wakin On a Pretty Daze and B’lieve I’m Goin Down… back to back in a two-year span. The clip was serendipitous, boasting all-time tunes like “Wakin On a Pretty Day” and “Pretty Pimpin.” It was the moment that solidified Vile’s post-War on Drugs momentum. Since then, it’s felt like the Philly axeman has been searching for the magic and only found it in increments. Albums like Bottle It In and (watch my moves) were great in some places and routine and lacking color elsewhere. Vile makes fun of his own propensity for sameness on “Back to Moon Beach,” when he sings “These recycled riffs ain’t goin’ anywhere anytime soon.” But for every standout track like “One Trick Ponies,” “Bassackwards” and “Chazzy Don’t Mind,” he’d take two steps in reverse on cuts like “Cold Was the Wind” and “Hey Like a Child.”

Back to Moon Beach hits differently, though. The nine chapters sound like Vile is at a crossroads, unsure of where to move next. Such a hurdle has pushed him into a familiar place—one where guitar solos are at the top of the laundry list. And Vile shows no signs of wanting to speed up, still lamenting all of life’s relentless complexities at his trademark pace. You can cook a hard-boiled egg quicker than it takes to get through a Kurt Vile song, and we love him for that. The stretched-out jams on Back to Moon Beach are consistent with the last 15 years of his sound, yet it holds some of the greatest work Vile’s done in nearly a decade; as a Smoke Ring For My Halo truther, I don’t say that kind of thing lightly.

The album kicks off with “Another good year for the roses,” one of the best songs Vile has put out in eight years (on part, for me, with “Chazzy Don’t Mind”). It’s the kind of track that you center an entire project around. At five-and-a-half minutes, it’s got everything a peak Kurt Vile song needs: drawling piano, downtempo, peculiar vocal musings and a million-dollar solo that carries on forever. It’s perfect, the stuff of true magic. Immediately, “Touched somethin (caught a virus)” follows like a punctuated ballad full of cynicism. It’s the darkest he’s sounded in 12 years, as he muses on afflictions through the kind of poetics we’ve come to expect in his catalog: “Cup runneth over with lifeblood and then it sprung a leak, it took about a week,” he sings. “And, man, I got a migraine, the glorious pain.” It’s a simple premise—lament the sickness that consumes you—yet Vile tackles it with a nuance his recent albums have often not fully bought into, with patchy, glittery guitar chords and imperfections in tow.

The eight-minute title track takes a while to get going before Vile hams up the melodrama a bit. “Swimming in the sky, I’m higher than God, never coming down at all until the fall,” he sings, as a concoction of strings, keys and drum beats sit beneath his vocals like an undercurrent of messy vibes attempting to be atmospheric—and I mean that in a good way, as the harmonica pulls are nothing short of kaleidoscopic. Once the song gets its footing, it glows into a stirring and pensive performance from Vile. It’s the kind of patient, slightly experimental work that keeps the arrangement above water. We even get a signature “Woo!” from him thrown in there, for good measure. “Like a wounded bird trying to fly” is based on a simile written by Vile’s daughter, and a propulsive drum machine kicks the track into an acoustic tune you could find on any of his recent projects. It’s not extraordinary, and it’s one of the moments on Back to Moon Beach that feels like its “non-album material” tagline.

But the good stuff picks back up again on “Blues come for some,” as Vile is alone at a piano, allowing his voice to take center-stage like never before. “Raccoon-eyed daughter of a jackal comes to me in my dreams,” he sings. “When I am low, grab onto what I know and just strum a little something for me and her.” It’s a cheeky thing to muse on a song rid of guitars, but it’s a mark of Vile’s musicianship—as “Blues come for some” is a clear portrait of what he can make when his hands aren’t holding a six-string. Here’s to hoping there’s more of that in whatever chapter comes next for him. “Tom Petty’s gone (but tell him i asked for him)” is Vile’s moment of plainspoken vulnerability, as he questions what he’d ask his musical heroes—like Petty, David Berman and Bob Dylan—had they ever met. “If you see him on another dimension, will you tell him we all really miss him?” he asks in regards to Berman, atop a looping outlaw-tinged, guitar-driven instrumental. “Asked for him, asked for him” he repeats over and over into the coda, where he breaks out into the same type of solo we’ve heard him make light-work of for much of this century.

Back to Moon Beach was largely made in 2019 at Panoramic House in Northern California. But what sticks out greatly is that the songs are likely the last Vile will release that feature his longtime multi-instrumentalist collaborator and member of the Violators, Rob Laakso, who passed away this year from cancer. On tracks like “Tom Petty’s gone” and “Touched somethin,” Laakso’s guitar work reverberates, snarls, laughs and shines. Cate Le Bon’s production can be heard throughout, with the added synthesizers and organs beneath Vile’s worn-in rock instrumentation. Even on a cover of “Must Be Santa,” Vile makes it fully his own—and Le Bon’s electronica pairs with his singing better than you’d ever expect. That’s not to say it’s going to become a holiday staple, but it very well shall endure as eons greater than Dylan’s mind-boggling, OG construction.

The only song that feels out of place is the single-edit of “Cool Water,” which clocks in at just a minute shorter than the (watch my moves) original. It’s a definitive, sensical end-cap on Vile’s insistence that Back to Moon Beach is not an LP. I have to tip my cap to him for not giving us an inch on our own assumptions—but this album is still hardly an EP. The jams are gentle and deliberate even in their most slacker-ish suits, as Vile makes his own unorthodox route from Point A to Point B. This time, however, it feels like he’s not sure what the destination is—nor does he seem all that bothered by the uncertainty. It’s hard to contextualize where Back to Moon Beach really fits in Kurt Vile’s catalog, whether it’s a release meant to foreshadow a next body of work or serve as a finale to the (watch my moves) era. If “Another good year for the roses” is “non-album material,” then I can wait on Vile’s next LP for a while.

Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.