Kurt Vile – Constant Hitmaker

Not since Igor Stravinsky could someone make the wrong note sound so right. What I find coolest about Kurt Vile is his ability to make slightly off-kilter tunes so irresistible, even to an untrained ear - the vague, kinkily-phrased "Deep Sea"; the deliberately iffy tuning and awkward, shuffling melody of "Don't Get Cute"; the distracted, wandering chromaticism of "Classic Rock in Spring" grinding against against its sunny rhythmic impulses; the noisy but mellow plodding of "Best Love"; even the relatively conventional minor-key plucking of "Slow Talkers" can't resist taking a few memorable left turns. But the shift the album makes halfway through feels forced and robs it of any sense of consistency it's been building until this point, and it's here that you start getting the sense that the whole thing is a little overstuffed. It has its dull - maybe even hackneyed - moments, and could easily have been shorn of a few minutes without sacrificing any of its good ideas; the "experimental" stuff especially, which ranges from obnoxious to boring and, as far as experiments go, has very little to share with us in the way of interesting findings, but it's a brief misstep and not significant enough to be a huge suck on the overall quality of the album. True, "Constant Hitmaker" may not be up to the standard of Kurt Vile's more recent stuff, but it's still a keeper (though, I suspect, maybe not a much of a grower).