There are 5,287 words of lyrics on this album, the delivery of which sounds at first stream-of-conscious, but clearly isn’t: Themes double back on themselves after long digressions, while details about family and friends crop up in multiple places, the whole thing coming off like an epic poem some enterprising comp-lit major might compare to Ulysses. But then the music is disarmingly straightforward: On most of the songs, it’s as swollen and sluggish as rain clouds. Harmonies and double-tracked vocals, pianos and light drums.
Mark Kozelek in the twenty-first century has insights as compelling as those he gave us in the late twentieth century, and an indication of an enduring creative figure is surely that ability to translate perception into a new – but no less vital – language. but few would deny its winter-sharp clarity. On “Benji“, Kozelek is at least as piercing and persuasive as in his best output over the last two decades.
Benji was truly out on its own in 2014. At the heart of the album was a stunning breed of open-book lyricism, mundanities like Postal Service reunion shows or ordering crab cakes appear in the same libretto as death by accident fire and first sexual experiences. All these chronicles exist against Mark Kozelek’s backdrop of keeping guitars and sprawling instrumentation. Simultaneously one of the year’s most gut-wrenching and and most liberating LPs,
