Kurt Vile

Childish Prodigy

Matador Records

Philadelphia’s own Kurt Vile, vocalist/guitarist, has made his Matador debut this year by releasing Childish Prodigy, an album loaded with gently plucked guitar strings, soft-spoken words, and a driving drum beat all amounting to that 70’s American underground rock feel.

Kurt has released two other albums last year on below-the-radar indie labels; Constant Hitmaker and God is Saying this to You finds Kurt working by himself in a simple home recording studio developing his craft which, even though is reminiscent of that lone singer-songwriter paradigm, comes forth to create something else.

Vile called upon The Violators, his backing band, to appear on this album, which, despite that Neil Young vibe the album induces, Childish Prodigy breaks out of that quiet, hushed, intimate mood. Drum machines, spaced out horns, and some reclusively looped guitar tracks push that country folk field to wider dimensions. In tracks like Amplifier and Goodbye, Freaks Kurt embraces different aspects of psychedelia that pushes the album further to something that can be coming from an obscure rock band that might have influenced Tom Petty.

In the second to last track on the album, He’s Alright, we can feel a sense that Kurt is not alright; momentum builds throughout the track as Kurt cries “I’d rather grab the bull by the horns and rip them off with callous hands”, reminding me of Going to Hell by Brian Jonestown Massacre.

Despite having his backup band on the album and all those instruments we hear, most of the tracks never really explode or blossom to anything triumphant – rather there’s a sense of stagnation where the instruments find themselves minimized.

Most of the tracks feel more like aimless meandering where tracks blend into one another never really giving the feel of something definitive.

At the end of the album we can forgive Kurt for whatever the disc lacks in dynamics, because over all, the album does feel like some psych folk gem that one might run across in some second hand record store somewhere in 1970’s middle America.

-Daniel Lopez Lopez