Kurt Vile’s time is slippery. Mondays soften unnoticed into Saturdays. The solar rises, units once more, then all of it flows bassackwards. His prolonged information give the impression of a sequence of sunlit days, half-remembered in a haze. But when listening to Vile’s music could make one aware of the transience of all issues, the person on the heart of those songs doesn’t at all times appear aware of this fact. He lives from second to second—usually the second of his songs’ creation, which he likes to relate out loud, describing his writing course of and shouting out his influences. He’s deeply self-aware, and if his new album-length EP, Again to Moon Seashore, at first looks like a continuation of this thematic and sonic mindset, he has a ready-made response to anybody hoping for a mid-career switcheroo: “These recycled riffs ain’t goin’ wherever anytime quickly,” he sings on the title monitor.

Again to Moon Seashore consists largely of gold-hued guitar jams with easy chord progressions and beneficiant runtimes. One of many first lyrics on opener “One other good 12 months for the roses” is “Lately I do no matter I would like,” and Moon Seashore at first looks like a dedication to this credo. The songs are full of slacker hedges like “man” and “no matter.” Generally he gained’t hassle to put in writing any phrases if a “woo” suffices. The title monitor means that “Moon Seashore” is the psychological panorama he escapes to whereas making music, and its distance from the day by day grind appears aligned with idioms like “head within the clouds.”

And but the Vile character appears much less content material, much less glad, much less serene on these songs than on any he’s written since 2011’s Smoke Ring For My Halo. Some sort of dissatisfaction has set in, and it’s not really easy to only play it away. “Cup runneth over with lifeblood/Then it sprung a leak,” he sings on “Touched one thing (caught a virus),” earlier than complaining a few migraine. “Like a wounded chook attempting to fly” facilities on a simile apparently written by his daughter Awilda. “All the time did I like that line/However by no means did I apply it to myself ’til simply then,” he sings. On “Blues come for some,” the splendid layers of guitar fall away, and we hear Vile alone at a piano, confessing: “Blues got here to me in my desires/And it stayed.” The reason for Vile’s blues is commonly ambiguous, although “Tom Petty’s gone (however inform him i requested for him)” suggests one reply. Vile wonders aloud what he may need stated to late musicians Tom Petty or David Berman had he identified them, earlier than concluding that he won’t have discovered something to say: Bob Dylan remains to be alive, in spite of everything, and if Vile met him in particular person, he’d “soften down like a nuclear reactor.”