Review Summary: I’m gonna tell you a story cos, you know, what the heck.
All things considered Mark Kozelek’s a bit of a cock.
Benji had some time to sink in to the general consciousness before his awkward spat with The War on Drugs, but on-stage antics dominated news of
Universal Themes from the get-go. The defiance of two empty seats was enough to provoke a rant about the music press and a particular female journalist who apparently, despite appearances, totally wants to *** him. Nice one Mark.
But that’s all part of the Mark Kozelek experience, right? It’s just a joke, he’s playing around and we should lighten up? I don’t buy it – the past three years have given us three album’s worth of diary-entry songwriting; it doesn’t give much space for a screen of private irony. Besides, if Mark’s an act it would ruin him - the rawness of his recent output relies on being a man who doesn’t hold anything back.
So he lets it all out and, as a result, it turns out he’s a cock, but then again there is an extent this dickhead-ness should be embraced. Every meter of the void between Kozelek and his audience is necessary because a lot of the appeal of his post-2012 career, for me at least, comes from the fact we have almost nothing in common. Folk fandom was all getting a bit flannel-shirt, beard and 50 ways to love organic coffee-y for a moment, but here was this confrontational old rocker with a song about how much he is going to miss his mum.
I can’t quite shake the thought that at least a little bit of the music press’ treatment of Mark, beyond the easy target of ill-judged live rants, stems from his utter failure to fulfil the folk-musician archetype. If he’s a tortured artist he’s tortured in a different room to the others: in a banjo-less, tv-filled mock-up of the classic American suburban home. Swap
The Unbearable Lightness of Being for
Nightstalker, vintage clothes for Walmart, and you get Mark – his musical appeal to the indie-folk crowd is an accident waiting to happen. In the end, the 20-something blogster flips between endearment and outrage at a speed too dizzying to handle. We are left confused.
This all matters quite a lot when you make music as personal as Kozelek’s, and with
Universal Themes stretching songs to the 10 minute mark it takes a lot of his life to fill out the lyrics. We hear him straddle a peculiar line between mundane and alien: singing about the experience of playing himself in a movie, he chooses to focus on meeting someone new and, what seems to be the most universal theme of all, watching tv. Hidden behind the overwhelming bulk of bizarre details is a point, somewhere, but much harder to grasp than the obsessive documentation of events would suggest. Like his regular outbursts,
Universal Themes invites a bewildering perspective, and we don’t really know what to think.
The method in the madness came to me while watching
Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Werner Herzog’s film of a doomed expedition to El Dorado. The camera paused on the river much longer than it needed to, and though the frame kept still the river seemed to mutate under this prolonged gaze. What was once familiar is now made alien, disturbing and profound as we are forced to view it with no distractions. Later, on reading the new promotional interviews for
Universal Themes, it is made more obvious. By giving such prolonged and intricate sketches of his life, Mark invites us to likewise gaze at what we would otherwise pass over: to see the profoundness of the mundane.
For all his tv binges, trash literature and shopping trips to Target, Mark’s actually coming up to some pretty highbrow *** here. Thinkers like Deleuze, Nietzsche and Heidegger have similar things to say about the purpose of art – that it should strip away the familiar to reveal the uncanny reality in what we barely think about.
Exactly what he’s revealing is difficult to describe. With
Benji it was obvious and even
Among the Leaves has fairly graspable threads to string the songs together;
Universal Themes meanders obsessively, not so much a thematic narrative as a scattershot view of his post-
Benji life. Mark is telling us what lies behind, well, Mark, which takes us to the most important question – do we care?
The answer is a resounding "mostly". Day to day life has less of a draw than death, but Mark’s got the talent to string it all together excellently. What would be complete tripe in the hands of anyone else will flourish in his, and
Universal Themes finds itself book-ended by masterclasses in off-kilter but accessible structure. Some of the self-referential jokes wear thin after a couple of listens, making "Cry Me A River Williamsburg Sleeve Tattoo Blues" more skipped than not, but the background clatter of Steve Shelley keeps everything interesting when weak humour fails.
The funny thing about the outrage toward the latest Kozelek-isode is that it was completely unsurprising to anyone who has been paying attention for the last couple of albums or so. As a folk musician Mark is supposed to be a certain type of person, but he isn’t, and that should have been obvious. He's not a likeable person, but again that should have been obvious. His new material requires a more distanced approach than most of us are used to: to try to move past the uproar, wait, and see what we can take from all this when our overexposure turns the banal into something much more interesting. As he might be finding out now, this kind of concentration is a little too much to ask in an age of rapid music consumption, especially when the album release is dominated by misogyny.
It’s hard to move past this when there’s so much going on but, whether we expect to like it or not – which mostly translates to whether we expect to be able to put up with
him or not, we owe it to
Universal Themes to try. Despite his behaviour, it's still a great album.
