On Kurt Vile’s seventh solo album, he covers Charlie Rich’s Rollin With the Flow. As song titles go, it’s as good a description as any of this Philadelphia native’s modus operandi. Without fail, the songs on Bottle It In unfurl in a leisurely fashion, recalling by turns Neil Young at his most free range and Pavement’s way with a skew-whiff melody, with Vile laconically drawling verses that sometimes sound as if they’ve been improvised on the spot over the top of gently meandering guitar solos. The centrepiece is Bassackwards, the combination of hypnotic interlocking acoustic guitar riffs and stoner poetry lyrics seemingly over too soon, even at nine minutes.
Elsewhere, the gorgeous Loading Zones opens proceedings with an early REM jangle and a lyric about Vile’s meter-evading, oblique parking strategy: “One-stop shop life for the quick fix before you get a ticket/ That’s the way I live my life/ I park for free”. Check Baby locks into a more muscular groove; Skinny Mini benefits from washes of artfully deployed distortion.
Across 80 sprawling minutes, Vile does lose his focus occasionally, most notably on the 10-minute title track, which fails to gain much in the way of traction, and the similarly unremarkable Cold Was the Wind. Still, this is an album to savour.
