When Kurt Vile isn’t playing guitar – which isn’t often, during his kaleidoscopic 90-odd minutes on stage tonight – his fingers do not rest. As he hands over one instrument to his tireless guitar tech, just before hoisting a fresh one on to his shoulder, Vile’s digits absent-mindedly play air guitar.
The Philadelphian cuts an almost cartoonish figure on the first of two London gigs: clad in a plaid shirt, his face is framed by curtains of long, dark wavy hair, and he is noodling away at blank space with a grin. It would be wrong, though, to dismiss Vile as some addled emissary from the 90s. He is a throwback, and a great many of his songs are meandering, part-baked workouts; over eight albums, Vile has become renowned, if not quite famous, for peddling dazed stoner pop. He’ll occasionally throw out a nasal non sequitur that confirms a love of Pavement, the 90s slacker band nonpareil, but that decade is not the era this prolific guitar hero most authentically harks back to.
Tonight’s opener, Loading Zones – a killer track off Vile’s latest and most immediate album, Bottle It In, out last month – finds the singer dodging through the backstreets of Philadelphia, taking advantage of the parking opportunities offered by loading bays. “I park for free!” goes the gleefully gruff chorus.
But Vile’s meter dodging is oddly metaphysical; the song is, in part, about loving his home town and taking “a bite out of the world”. And the freewheeling guitars do gnarly, borderline psychedelic things with heartland American rock.
At 38, Vile is the latest in a line of leftfield guitarists to expound what is really a rich new iteration of classic American rock. One pilgrim on this road less travelled is Jeff Tweedy, a decade older than Vile at 51, whose records – mostly as Wilco – have sustained an early country-rock bent while embarking on wide-ranging experiments. Vile’s most obvious fellow traveller, however, is Adam Granduciel, whose recent albums as the War on Drugs have reimagined Springsteen’s 80s period for hazier times.
Vile was in the early line-up of the War on Drugs, and Granduciel was in the early version of the Violators; the two Philadelphia-based musicians remain pals despite the refocusing into separate outfits. Granduciel is now playing arenas, but Vile’s fortunes are none too shabby: his career has snowballed gently. His current world tour is set to end in April, taking only January off; Bottle It In is his highest charting solo album yet.
Tonight Vile plays an old song called Runner Ups, which refers to a close friend’s death in his early 20s. “My best friend’s long gone but I’ve got runner-ups,” Vile sings gratefully, and you’d like to think Granduciel is one of them. Perhaps the like-minded Australian Courtney Barnett, with whom Vile released an engaging LP, Lotta Sea Lice, in 2017, fits the bill too.
If Granduciel has a fetish for Springsteen, then Vile is the flannel wearer most resonantly channelling Neil Young. Vile is not the first long hair to do so – Dinosaur Jr’s J Mascis got there in the late 80s – but his searching style and bittersweet tone hark quite convincingly back to that master of ragged glories. Any veteran fan of widescreen Americana grousing about the absence of new greats would do well to lend an ear to Vile and his band, who combine the electric eloquence of Young with the late Tom Petty’s melodic aim. (Vile also covers Springsteen in the encore: Downbound Train.)
You could pick any number of unshowy guitar highlights out of tonight’s set. Head down, focused, Vile is not the kind of guy to stick a foot ostentatiously on the monitor. He is the kind of guy who will whoop unaffectedly every so often, happy to be spooling out guitar solos to a crowd who will applaud them, even if it means leaving his wife – they were teenage sweethearts – and two young daughters at home. Electronically assisted, Bassackwards features the interplay of treated backwards guitar and finger-picking forward motion. The pretty, loping Wakin’ on a Pretty Day, from the 2013 album Wakin’ on a Pretty Daze, involves a wah-wah pedal applied to an acoustic guitar. Weird, crunchy things ensue.
Vile plays 10 different guitars tonight: a wide array of electrics, a number of acoustics of varying sizes and body shapes, a banjo. All are plugged into a swath of effects pedals; two more Violators, Jesse Trbovich and Rob Laakso (Granduciel’s replacement), swap between bass, guitar and keyboards; their effects rigs are generous too. The only real musical disappointment tonight is that Mary Lattimore, part of the support act, doesn’t join in on harp as she does on the recorded version of Bassackwards.
For all the affable mellowness that courses through this gig, Vile’s back catalogue is full of anxiety and existential fear. Bottle It In was originally scheduled to come out last spring, but Vile delayed it till October, exhausted from recording and touring Lotta Sea Lice and wanting his most outgoing record to sound exactly right.
The first encore, Pretty Pimpin’, from 2015 album b’lieve i’m goin down, is Vile’s greatest hit thus far, if we’re crunching numbers (11m+ YouTube views, 46m+ Spotify streams). And although the song’s narrative plays for laughs – “pretty pimpin’”, notes Vile of the strange man wearing his clothes – it finds Vile dissociating wildly, not recognising the face in the mirror. Death crops up where you least expect it. Bassackwards has more than an undertow of dread, never mentioning politics directly, but spiralling, unanchored.
And if Vile’s wordplay doesn’t grab you, his handiwork should. For I’m an Outlaw, Vile’s banjo plays off against organ keens. It was his original teenage instrument, giving rise to the droney bent of his sound. Back in 2013, Vile told the US magazine Spin: “I’d strum it like a guitar, which was key for me. Kids who learn to play guitar usually do it in standard tuning. But a banjo is in open tuning, with more overtones and ethereal chords.”
It’s instructive to note that Vile – his real name, and not an ironic riff on Kurt Weill – always travels with an acoustic guitar to hand, just in case. On tonight’s evidence, it’s a habit you might peg somewhere between a dedication to his craft, compulsion and self-soothing. You come to Vile for the beatific mooching, but you stay because of his candour and unexpected gravitas.
