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Kurt Vile

So Outta Reach EP

(Matador; US: 8 Nov 2011; UK: Import)

Joining the best-aged staples of heartland rock with smoky production, Philly singer-songwriter Kurt Vile’s most recent full-length, Smoke Ring for My Halo, justly garnered much critical acclaim not long after its March release. Thankfully, his latest showing, the 30-minute So Outta Reach EP, is chockfull of everything that made that album so special: nimble guitar picking, characteristically passive lyrics (“Life‘s a while“), warmly mumbled vocals, and enveloping atmospherics. Highlight “The Creature“ is unmistakably Vile, which is to say it‘s so idiosyncratic that it‘s hard to imagine anyone else—not even the War on Drugs‘ Adam Granduciel, Vile‘s former bandmate and frequent reference point—writing or recording it. The penultimate track here is a fuzzed-up cover of Bruce Springsteen‘s ”Downbound Train”. Of course, So Outta Reach won’t garner the same legacy as the album that song came from, Born in the U.S.A., but at its best, it’s enjoyable enough to pretend that it will.

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This year's top artists are a diverse lot represented by two of the world's biggest pop divas, a plethora of critically adored indie faves, some new talents emerging from the hip-hop underground, a couple of veteran Americana acts, and a few alt-rock legends among many more.
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Some of 2011's best songwriting came from artists whose work could be broadly defined as "alternative". Few of these artists fit the mold of the traditional singer-songwriter, creating music the blurs the lines defining genres.
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When it comes to James Blake’s music, it has been an extremely slow journey towards appreciation for me, which might just be an appropriate pace given his style of music.
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When Vile nails it, when all the disparate elements of his sound converge, you realize why he's the face of our new strain of fuzzy Americana.
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