Track of the Day: Kurt Vile - "Wakin on a Pretty Day"

What is it about a guitar, an instrument so understood in construction and execution, that allows it to effortlessly shift time and space? Few artists are better at this false manipulation than Philadelphia’s Kurt Vile, a singer/songwriter bent on turning intimate guitar patterns into gorgeous, suffocating anthems. 

“Wakin on a Pretty Day” is Vile’s first output from the forthcoming album Wakin on a Pretty Daze, his first album since Smoke Ring For My Halo. In many ways, “Wakin on a Pretty Day” carries on with such a matter-of-fact attitude that it never sounds as if it starts or stops, merely blending into the foreground in a way that engulfs everything surrounding it, whether in the real or virtual world. As acoustic and electric guitar compound atop each other, Vile’s breathy, hidden vocals shape a track so deceitfully hypnotic that it could be three minutes long, repeated three times over just as easily an abstract from something much larger. “Wakin on a Pretty Day” is an effortless, singular moment in time; the kind of music Vile has been releasing for years and the kind we hope runs rampant throughout the whole of Wakin on a Pretty Daze when it releases April 9th on Matador.

Wakin on a Pretty Daze tracklist:

01. Wakin on a Pretty Day

02. KV Crimes 

03. Was All Talk 

04. Girl Called Alex 

05. Never Run Away 

06. Pure Pain 

07. Too Hard 

08. Shame Chamber 

09. Snowflakes Are Dancing 

10. Air Bud 

11. Goldtone