“Playin’ in the music room in my underwear,” he narrates on the warm-toned daydream “Flyin (Like a Fast Train).” “Feelin’ fine, and then my psyche crumbled, pell-mell, stumbled….” “Like Exploding Stones,” the seven-minute gem released as the album’s lead single, might be about a migraine or an existential crisis. The anxiety that’s frequently lurked in the background of his fantastically chill music is still there, but you’ll have to work harder to locate it. He’s wisely stopped searching for the next level up, focusing instead on the beautifully unfocused be-here-now beatitude that’s always been his greatest gift. Instead, he stretches out and gets comfortable on his loosey-goosiest jams to date, handing out 74 minutes of mellow wisdom off the dome. The irony is, it was on Matador releases like 2015’s B’lieve I’m Goin’ Down… and 2018’s Bottle It In that Vile seemed to set his sights on a higher tier of modern-rock hitmaking, with tightly-crafted singles like “Pretty Pimpin” and “Loading Zones.” There’s not much of that ambition to be found on Watch My Moves - fair enough, since it’s harder than ever to know what a modern-rock hit even means these days. What’s that? You want to offer him a major-label deal after the eight-album run that made him one of the past decade’s foremost practitioners of the art of shaggy philosophizing once known as indie rock? Well, sure, that sounds all right. It’s been a few years since we’ve heard from our old buddy KV, and it seems he’s spent much of that time relaxing in his castle of chords, feeling the cosmic breeze, listening to the colors of the wind, and watching time pass slowly. That’s how he rolls on Watch My Moves, the 42-year-old folk-rocker’s ninth LP and first for Verve Records. “Man, life can sure be fun.” A horn section adds a stately fanfare for the common dude Vile sings along for a few wordless bars, then calls it a day on the first-thought, best-thought moment of Zen he calls “Goin on a Plane Today.” The poet-king of Philadelphia is at an airport somewhere in North America, pondering the prospects of his own mortality and a cold beer, when an epiphany hits him: “Listenin’ to ‘Heart of Gold’/Gonna open up for Neil Young,” he muses over a simple piano figure. The new Kurt Vile album begins, like many great yarns, in medias res.

My reviews