Kozelek

#4 'Mark Kozelek & Desertshore' by Mark Kozelek & Desertshore

Mark Kozelek has been really busy this year, issuing a surprisingly good covers album and an electropop-tinged collaboration with Mark Lavelle as well as this one, which is the pick of the bunch and, I think, probably his best since the first Sun Kil Moon album. It also made me actually laugh out loud in the street the first time I listened to it - not the usual response to the famously maudlin ex-Red House Painter's work, for sure. It's a little like a long lost last cheerful album from Kozelek's first band, in fact - whilst there's plenty of reflective lyrical reference to the passing of time, the loss of old friends like Jason Molina and Tim Mooney and the aging of his father, there's also some really funny diary-entry stuff about the rigours of touring and recording as a middle-aged troubadour, calling promoters, hotels, getting a decent meal and the like... Really good.