Kurt Vile Tries to Make Sense of the In-Betweens on Back to Moon Beach
The Philadelphian's 52-minute EP is full of earnest, pensive jams, genuinely good cover songs and an uncertain outlook on what might come next.
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.