Over the past decade, Kurt Vile has rarely strayed from his musical lane—a consistency that’s only shined a spotlight on the singer-songwriter’s narrowly rigid artistic sensibilities. He continues to stick to his guns on his ninth studio album, Watch My Moves, with the aesthetic and sonic differences between the songs here and those on his most recent albums, including 2018’s Bottle It In, so slight as to be negligible.
Watch My Moves is a competently written set of Americana-inflected folk rock, performed by a seasoned musician with more than capable accompanying players. But it’s disappointing to see Vile play it so safe, filtering the sounds of Neil Young, Townes Van Zandt, and Randy Newman through the sonic sensibilities of late-’90s and early ‘00s indie rock yet again.
Vile flaunts his songwriting skills on “Fo Sho,” which perfectly balances cockiness and restraint and features muscular guitar riffs complemented by synthesizers that chirp and bubble away in the background. On the delightfully psychedelic “Palace of OKV in Reverse,” swirling guitars offset Vile’s surreal lyrics and half-spoken, half-sung delivery. It’s moments like these that foreground the singer’s knack for creating fun, memorable slacker anthems.
But tracks like “Like Exploding Stones,” which contains a genuinely heartfelt melody set against swirling synthesizers and meandering guitar work, suffers from Vile’s recurring habit of taking a good musical idea and running with it for far too long across the length of a track. The song’s four-note melody can only be embellished so many times over the song’s seven-minute runtime. Elsewhere, the seven-and-a-half minute “Wages of Sin” is even more tedious due to its lumbering tempo and lack of melodic or instrumental development.
The melodies running throughout Watch My Moves are packaged in rather bland instrumentals that rarely offer the catchiness, dynamism, or carefree joyousness of Vile’s prior work. This isn’t to say that he’s only worth listening to when making upbeat music, but that he doesn’t bring his roguish charm to his latest. Though this album will satisfy those nostalgic for the mellower side of ’70s and ’90s rock, it doesn’t chart new terrain for Vile. His “moves” are starting to border on cliché, as he sits and sings with his guitar on a trail already well-traveled.
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