Did his parents do it on purpose? They had to, since the homonym German composer is too well known for the name Kurt Vile being just a coincidence. But the connection will just stay there, as his music is some kind of experimentation with Americana but has nothing to do with the author of ‘The Threepenny Opera’
Kurt Vile and the Violators was opening for the Soft Pack on Thursday night at the Echoplex, and I could tell Kurt was at the same star level than the LA band, seeing how many people had suddenly packed themselves to the stage and how many photographers were rushing even closer.
However, the Philadelphian band’s music was so dense, so thick, it put me in the middle of an impenetrable fog, lost, looking for some signs of life in the middle of so much noise, and if I encountered some ghostly figures of Neil Young, Springsteen or others at times, the music was so indiscernible, it was pretty hard to find my way through the smog.
I mean, I listened to his songs posted on his myspace page, but the music I experienced during his live set was quite different, and the compactness of his sound quite emphasized. I am not expecting the artist to reproduce the sound of the recording on stage, on the contrary, I prefer to be surprised by inventiveness, but this inaudible mumbling among this slow but quite violent thunderstorm of repetitive reverb guitars seemed endless, like a long imposed hypnosis session, made of experimental bold noises.
There were some brighter moments, but this is how it sounded most of the time:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNOzvjxCy-8
The four of them had long hair, and Vile, in particular, was constantly bent on his guitar, his brown hair covering his face most of the time, making the photographers adopt all kind of acrobatic positions to capture a glimpse of his face.
He signed last year with Matador, and Thursday night, he played a lot of songs from his last album ‘Childish Prodigy’, but I had a hard time to tell, my ears could not perceive the end or the beginning of each one of them. I have read he is playing in a different style each time, so may be I have to see him again.