Kurt Vile and Steve Gunn collaborated on record in 2015 for their contributions to Three Lobed Recordings Parallelogram series. That previously ornate and limited title is now released in a nonlimited format standing along and outside of that prior collection.

The two artists, originally connected by mutual friends and geographic proximity, have long pushed the others continued artistic development. Despite sharing many live stages over the years, this collaborative album represents the first time that the two have worked together in the studio. Viles side sees him recast tracks by John Prine (Way Back When) and Randy Newman (Pretty Boys, featuring some truly *electric* guitar flourishes from Gunn) as if they were KV originals. The theme of reinvention continues with Vile tearing through a solo banjo rendition of his Red Apples (originally from his God Is Saying This To You LP), retitled here as Red Apples For Tom Scharpling. Gunn takes on a late period Nico track, 60/40, and pulls a lysergic rocker out of the tracks goth-ish roots. The bulk of Gunns contribution is the epically winding Spring Garden, a track in the vein of some of his other longform guitar excursions. Featuring signature contributions from Vile and Mary Lattimore, this hypnotizing cut is unmistakably a new classic in Gunns catalog.

TRACK LISTING

Pretty Boy (Kurt Vile)
Way Back Then (Kurt Vile)
Red Apples For Tom Scharpling (Kurt Vile)
NPR Reject (Kurt Vile)
60/40 (Steve Gunn)
Spring Garden (Steve Gunn)

Kurt Vile’s Speed, Sound, Lonely KV (ep) was recorded and mixed in sporadic sessions that spanned four years at The Butcher Shoppe studio in Nashville, TN. It includes five songs —covers of John Prine and “Cowboy” Jack Clement as well as two originals —and was recorded alongside a cast of local heavies like Bobby Wood, Dave Roe, and Kenny Malone with Dan Auerbach (The Black Keys) and Matt Sweeney (Chavez, Superwolf) tossed into the mix as well.

Most importantly, it features what KV has called "Probably the single most special musical moment in my life” –a duet with the late John Prine on the songwriter’s well-loved tune, “How Lucky.” “The truth is John was my hero for a long time when he came into The Butcher Shoppe to recut one of his deepest classics with me. And, man, I was floating and flying and I couldn't hear anything he told me while he was there till after he was gone for the night,” notes Vile in a personal statement that accompanies the record. “A couple nights later we were playing ‘How Lucky’ together again; this time onstage at the Grand Ole Opry on New Year's Eve at the turn of 2020. Nothing like seeing John and his band of musical brothers and family and friends playing into the new decade in front of an adoring audience on that stage in Nashville, TN... and, yup, that's just how lucky we all got that night."

TRACK LISTING

Speed Of The Sound Of Loneliness
Gone Girl
Dandelions
How Lucky (with John Prine)
Pearls

Reissued with the original 7” for the first time since its original pressing, and printed on coloured vinyl for the first time ever, Kurt Vile’s Matador debut Childish Prodigy is back this October.

TRACK LISTING

LP
Hunchback
Dead Alive
Overnite Religion
Freak Train
Blackberry Song
Monkey
Heart Attack
Amplifier
Inside Looking Out

7”
He's Alright
Farfisas In Falltime
Take Your Time

Travel can inspire in surprising ways: Kurt Vile discovered as much making his first record in three years, the eclectic and electrifying Bottle It In, which he recorded at various studios around the country over two very busy years, during sessions that usually punctuated the ends of long tours or family road trips.

Every song, whether it’s a concise and catchy pop composition or a sprawling guitar epic, becomes a journey unto itself, taking unexpected detours, circuitous melodic avenues, or open-highway solos. If Vile has become something of a rock guitar god—a mantle he would dismiss out of humility but also out of a desire to keep getting better, to continue absorbing new music, new sounds, new ideas—it’s due to his precise, witty playing style, which turns every riff and rhythm into points on a map and takes the scenic route from one to the next.

Using past albums as points of departure, Bottle It In heads off in new directions, pushing at the edges of the map into unexplored territory: Here be monster jams. These songs show an artist who is still evolving and growing: a songwriter who, like his hero John Prine, can make you laugh and break your heart, often in the same line, as well as a vocalist who essentially rewrites those songs whenever he sings them in his wise, laconic jive-talkin’ drawl. He revels in the minutiae of the music— not simply incorporating new instruments but emphasizing how they interact with his guitar and voice, how the glockenspiel evokes cirrocumulus clouds on “Hysteria,” how Kim Gordon’s “acoustic guitar distortion” (her term) engulfs everything at the end of “Mutinies,” how the banjo curls around his guitar lines and backing vocals from Lucius to lend a high-lonesome aura to “Come Again.”

These journeys took Vile more than two years to navigate, during which time he toured behind his breakout 2015 album b’lieve I’m goin’ down, recorded a duets album with Australian singer-songwriter-guitarist Courtney Barnett, opened for Neil Young in front of 90,000 people in Quebec, famously became a clue on Jeopardy, hung out with friends, took vacations with his wife and daughters. “I’ve been bouncing around a lot and recording all over. My family would meet me in the middle of America, and we’d go on a road trip somewhere. I would record in between all that stuff.”

As Vile prepares for another round of lengthy tours and countless shows, these songs should prove good company, reminders of the love and responsibility he has toward those he leaves at home and those
he meets along the way. That makes the sentiments resonate more strongly and lends Bottle It In an emotional weight. “It’s like that moment on the airplane,” Vile says, “when you’re on your way somewhere and you have that burst of panic. When you’re terrified of dying, that’s when you want people to know you love them.”

STAFF COMMENTS

Andy says: Everything we love about KV in one superb LP. More dynamic than his last outing and the most beautifully produced of all his albums, Bottle It In also features a cover of Charlie Rich's Rollin With The Flow: a massive, classic, country-pop beaut, which is possibly the prettiest thing he's ever committed to tape.

TRACK LISTING

1. Loading Zones
2. Hysteria
3. Yeah Bones
4. Bassackwards
5. One Trick Ponies
6. Rollin With The Flow
7. Check Baby
8. Bottle It In
9. Mutinies
10. Come Again
11. Cold Was The Wind
12. Skinny Mini
13. (bottle Back)

A conversation between friends, documented in raw, unvarnished song form, brimming with personal history, crackling with energy and shot through with humour - this is the collaborative album of Courtney Barnett and Kurt Vile. Two of the most acclaimed and gifted song writers of our generation “Lotta Sea Lice” also sees them roping in friends such as Dirty Three, Stella from Warpaint and Mick Harvey to create a body of work that sounds organic & candid.

The shared chemistry is immediately apparent in the breathtaking jam of opener and first single “Over Everything”, with dovetailing vocal lines and intricate, shimmering guitar stylings from the pair. The lyrics play out as a rambling dialogue as they compare notes about song-writing and inspiration – it was the first song written for this project, and comes accompanied by a beautiful black and white video from Australian director Danny Cohen which features Courtney and Kurt swapping lines over series of jaw dropping backdrops in rural Victoria and New Jersey as well as Melbourne and Philadelphia. It’s deceptively simple but incredibly effective.

Other tracks include the bluesy “Let it Go”, which itself was inspired by texts and emails between the duo, and the drop dead gorgeous ‘Continental Breakfast”, which showcases a more melodic side as the two harmonise over finger-picked acoustic guitars.

There are even more surprises in store, however, when the pair tackle each other’s tracks, with Vile delivering a delicious, souped-up version of “Outta the Woodwork” backed by Barnett herself, and Barnett taking on Vile’s “Peepin’ Tomboy” completely solo, to spine tingling results. The overall effect is that of Barnett and Vile throwing open the doors to their house to listeners - this is certainly Courtney and Kurt’s party alright, but this time, everyone is invited.

TRACK LISTING

Over Everything
Let It Go
Fear Is Like A Forest
Outta The Woodwork
Continental Breakfast
On Script
Blue Cheese
Peepin' Tom
Untogether

'b’lieve i'm goin down…' is Vile’s sixth album, and shows Kurt both deeply introspective and briskly self-assured. As longtime fan Kim Gordon wrote in her bio for the album: “Kurt does his own myth-making; a boy/man with an old soul voice in the age of digital everything becoming something else, which is why this focused, brilliantly clear and seemingly candid record is a breath of fresh air.

Recorded and mixed in a number of locations, including Los Angeles and Joshua tree, b’lieve i'm goin down… is a handshake across the country, east to west coast, thru the dustbowl history (“valley of ashes”) of woody honest strait forward talk Guthrie, and a cali canyon dead still nite floating in a nearly waterless landscape. The record is all air, weightless, bodyless, but grounded in convincing authenticity, in the best version of a singer songwriter upcycling.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Pretty Pimpin
2. I’m An Outlaw
3. Dust Bunnies
4. That’s Life, Tho (Almost Hate To Say)
5. Wheelhouse
6. Life Like This
7. All In A Daze Work
8. Lost My Head There
9. Stand Inside
10. Bad Omens
11. Kidding Around
12. Wild Imagination

B’lieve I’m Goin Down *
Less Talk (More Walkin Away) *
Nicotine Blues *
Bad Omens (No Faders) *
No Stranger To The Ball Bust *
Sax Omens (J Turbo) *
* = Bonus Tracks On Deluxe LP Only.

Kurt Vile has a way of tying time in knots. You can hear it on his new album "Smoke Ring For My Halo" from the get-go – the pinwheeling guitars and reaching atmospheres of "Baby’s Arms" are as strange as they are familiar: a demonstration of how Kurt can put worn methods and sounds through himself and end up with something that isn’t emotionally or sonically obvious. Instead we’re left with a record that contains traces of the past but doesn’t waste precious time in the now being reverent.

Once compared to Leonard Cohen, Tom Petty, Psychic TV and Animal Collective in the same review, Kurt can bring to mind anything from Suicide to Leo Kottke to My Bloody Valentine, Bob Seger, Nick Drake and Eastern ragas. Still, he pieces together these disparate elements so seamlessly and unpretentiously that such reference points are rendered pointless by the singularity of his sound. Kurt Vile might belong to a long lineage of classic American songwriters, but he’s the only one who’s alive and in his prime today.

This is the fourth time Kurt Vile has put an album’s worth of songs together and stuck a name on it, but in a sense "Smoke Ring For My Halo" is his first real album - every flinching guitar arpeggio and vocal wander was made to be here, made with this record in mind, to sit alongside another in situ and in sequence. It’s a record that is perfect for any given day during whatever season, to satisfy all moods in every possible scenario, be that first thing in the morning or last thing at night; today, tomorrow or five years from now.

TRACK LISTING

1. Baby’s Arms
2. Jesus Fever
3. Puppet To The Man
4. On Tour
5. Society Is My Friend
6. Runner Ups
7. In My Time
8. Peeping Tomboy
9. Smoke Ring For My Halo
10. Ghost Town