I got into Mark Kozelek’s Red House Painters at uni, at around the same time as I started listening to American Music Club, Come, Codeine and various other miserabilists. I don’t know that the moroseness of the music reflected my own emotional state; I rather suspect it informed it, insidiously. Sean Body’s biography of American Music Club, Wish the World Away (could Eitzel be a militant dysphoriac? Dipsomaniac is more like it; much of the book is taken up with accounts of the singer getting drunk and falling about the stage, in a manner apparently commensurable with Rock Greatness), quotes Philip Larkin, of all people, in a gloss on Eitzel’s view of his songs as “traps”:

Eitzel told Melody Maker’s Andrew Smith shortly after Everclear’s release:

“I’m not Judy Garland. My songs you can have, but you can’t have me…If you lived these songs, they could devastate you, so yeah, I do look for ways out of them. I’m afraid that I’m going to live my songs. It could happen so easily.”

The English poet Philip Larkin wrote in 1956, that “I came to the conclusion that to write a poem was to construct a verbal device that would preserve an experience indefinitely by reproducing it in whoever read the poem.”

Eitzel had recently reached the same conclusion: “These songs are not easy to sing,” he explains. “They are traps. I write them so that every time you sing them, you are invested with the same energy - with the same feeling. Otherwise you are not doing your job.”

But, lying in bed after a gig, staring at the ceiling for hours on end, Eitzel started to ask himself, “Is it worth it just to sing a song?” He discovered that Bob Mould would refuse to sing the H?sker D? song “Too Far Down” in concert, because in singing it, he would literally get too far down [italics added for comedic purposes - DF].

Yes, yes: laughable rock-ism. And that Larkin quotation is of a piece with a common-sensical definition of poetry and its purpose that is explicitly directed against the emotional obliquity of literary modernism. So, boo! But it’s an observable fact that listening to Codeine’s The White Birch all the way through is a serious downer, albeit the plateau of benumbed stasis it eventually arrives at (“the world is frozen now / it glitters, sparkles and shines”) is an emotional reference point I wouldn’t be without, a star to navigate by.

Sadcore mostly plays variations on Coleridge’s Dejection: An Ode; I once snuck in a line from Eitzel’s Western Sky (“the world’s a shadow of what it was before / the world gives off none of its own light”) into an undergraduate essay on that very poem. The Dejection ode is about the abeyance of “energy”, the dismal lull of whatever perturbances in the ether normally coax the medulla into sympathetic life (“ether” and “medulla” are terms from the psychological theory of the Associationist philosopher David Hartley, whom Coleridge admired so much he named his son after him). But it is also about the aesthetic and libidinal possibilities that are found still to exist even when the usual gratifications are unavailable.

The core of sadcore is not sadness but this hidden libido, with its exorbitant and impossible yearnings, its arbitrary and violent cathexes, its utter want of proportion. Mark Kozelek will make a big deal out of almost anything, from sunsets to falling leaves, often for six or seven (compulsively repetitive) minutes at a time. His songs are as notable for their fetishism and violence (“I still feel the sting in my hand from where I hit you / I keep your picture tidy and safe in a shrine”) as they are for their tenderness and wistful sensitivity. It’s therefore not altogether incongruous that Ghosts of the Great Highway, the first album from Kozelek’s Sun Kil Moon, should be littered with references to boxers; or that he should commemorate one lost love with the line “I buried my first victim when I was nineteen”.

Ghosts of the Great Highway is I think Kozelek’s best work so far; more than that, I think it’s the best thing of its kind he will ever do, of necessity, and the problem he faced after recording it was the same as that faced by Kevin Shields after the completion of MBV’s Loveless: having established a plane of consistency, and worked out all of the implications of that plane to the farthest reaches of its immanence, how do you jump out of the immanent and do something else? Kozelek’s answer was to record an album of Modest Mouse covers, Tiny Cities; it’s good, but I’m not sure it solves the problem.

Ghosts of the Great Highway essentially subsumes everything that went into the preceding three Red House Painters Records, acknowledges and lavishly repays debts to Cat Stevens and to Neil Young’s Harvest Moon, and pushes Kozelek’s voice in the direction of John Martyn’s, away from the enunciation of lyrics and towards the lyricism of a pure enunciation (“the use of the speech organs to produce sounds”). It may be in this last respect that further intensification of its programme is still possible. Unlike Tim (or Jeff) Buckley, say, Kozelek is not a technically gifted singer; as with Nick Drake, his vocal style is largely a matter of making the best of certain peculiar limitations. But what comes to the fore in the way Kozelek’s phrasing develops in Ghosts…is an increasing awareness of the connection between that voice and the alien, subterranean libido to which it testifies. It may be that a way forward is to be found in John Martyn’s Ways to Cry (not the version with Phil Collins…), in which Martyn’s woozy sobbing and drawling tell the true story of the song while the lyrics try on a variety of implausible excuses.