Pitchfork

The Moorestown Mark Kozelek sings about on this track from Sun Kil Moon's third album, April, due in... April, is presumably the township in Burlington County, New Jersey, which has a North Church Street mentioned in the first line. As far as I can tell, there's nothing special about the place except that it could be anywhere in America. Moorestown, for Kozelek at least, is a place to look out and see the rest of the world.

Like fellow Ohioan Jason Molina, Kozelek is innately interested in the novelistic notion of America as an enormous backdrop for human-scale stories and emotions, and like many of his previous songs, "Moorestown" is a travelogue driven by midtempo glittering guitars, grave vocals, and precise lyrical details like "Her house is not far from the school." This writerly and musical approach should have worn too thin long ago, but paradoxically, the more Kozelek worries it threadbare, the more compelling it becomes, as if accruing significance with each chord. Kozelek's down-hearted narrator follows his hometown lover from place to place-- London; Newport, Kentucky; somewhere in the Pacific Northwest; but not to Williamsburg. They've long since parted ways, but they'll always have Moorestown.

Stream:> Sun Kil Moon: "Moorestown"
[from April; due 04/01/08 on Calo Verde]