Details

Travel can inspire in surprising ways:Kurt Vilediscovered as much making his first record in three years, the eclectic and electrifyingBottle 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 Inheads 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 fromLuciusto lend a high-lonesome aura to "Come Again."

LP1

1. Loading Zones
2. Hysteria
3. Yeah Bones
4. Bassackwards
5. One Trick Ponies
6. Rollin With The Flow
7. Check Baby

LP2

1. Bottle It In
2. Mutinies
3. Come Again
4. Cold Was The Wind
5. Skinny Mini
6. (Bottle Back)