by Oliver on February 23, 2024 in EP
After the quasi-compilation album Quiet Beach House Nights and some separate singles such as the lost Christmas piece Christmas in New Orleans Mark Kozelek tries it out Birthday Girl exceptionally back in EP format.
In Birthday Girl Kozelek dwells on a repetitively plucked, amiable motif in the autobiography of romantic scenes, to which rumblings occur far in the background, almost inaudibly announcing a martial percussion like ready-made rain, and canned strings warming up until the song reaches the middle and at the end (in which Kozelek accompanies himself jubilantly) with a nonchalant rhythm, he sets off in a nonchalant manner, sways with a mild smile and falls into relaxed movement with accented orchestral arrangements, the diary lyrics of the old Kozelek actually amiably closer to the singing of the young ones Sun Kil Moon-Days leading (before Birthday Girl then contemplatively and calmly, tenderly reflecting on memories, throbs to his fade out).
The topic of age is, as the title probably suggests, also a topic Mark Kozelek Died Happy While Fishing – where the title hero, who has found peace, shakes the reflections about his potential death out of his uplifting wrist in a relaxed manner by using the ingredients of Birthday Girl starts even faster: the dominant minimal beat of a drum machine drives the acoustic guitar forward quickly but without hectic, remains spartan and catchy, and in other hands would probably have been a poppy, hopping singalong, before the synth strings (and a fade-out).
In The Call of the Wild the subdued beat strums to a catchy melody with which Kozelek and cooperation partner Nathan Winter round off the suspense of the EP and looks back as a love song that looks back on the transience of life for all companions during this time, while in the background a synthetic (electric guitar? keyboard? -)Wave textured in a real industrial trance and offers a striking, individually memorable but song-serving counterpart to the usual MO and in the bridge a kind of organ beat grooves in a speak-singing manner.
It works as a unit (seducing the folk singer-songwriter with indie pop ideas). Birthday Girl EP is just as good (thematically and stylistically in line) as it is divided into its individual contributions, because Kozelek provides a breath of fresh air in his trademark kit in terms of staging (albeit: a bit cheaply produced) and compositionally (albeit: quite simple and hardly complex) ( which once again does not emotionally reach the universal depth of his classics) – and (purists who will never prefer this lively, hopeful optimism to the sullen melancholy here may certainly claim otherwise) presents some of his best songs of the recent past.
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