Wakin on a Pretty Daze
Kurt Vile‘s sweetly slack fifth LP kicks in with a nine-and-a-half-minute song about taking a walk, hits peak stoner wonder in a song called “Air Bud” and fills in the spaces with trank-darted Dinosaur Jr. licks. But it’s no simple story of a wake-and-bake weekday: Vile claims to “never, as they say, touch the stuff,” and he’s more about fear of abandonment than self-isolation; and even a meditation on the uniqueness of snowflakes has a stormy, rather than syrupy, feel. A guitar-obsessed longhair who got his start self-distributing his music, Vile has let the outside in – even if a basketball-playing dog from an old DVD still proves to be his best inspiration.