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Vile began writing and recording music in his teens, dreaming of emulating heroes like Smog and Pavement and signing to his favourite label, Drag City. His aspirations, though, were at odds with the professional life that he led through his late teens and early twenties, when he led what he’s described as a ‘depressing’ blue-collar life working jobs that included driving a forklift truck. It wasn’t until 2005, when he returned to Philadelphia after a while living in Boston, that he made his start in the music business by forming The War on Drugs with his friend, Adam Granduciel. He continued to work on his own material, too, and a solo album, ‘Constant Hitmaker’, was released in the same year as The War on Drugs’ debut, ‘Wagonwheel Blues’.
From there on in, Vile’s status as a band member or a solo artist became increasingly more muddied; it was his career as the latter that seemed to really take off, meaning that Granduciel toured with him in his backing band The Violators in support of 2009’s ‘Childish Prodigy’. Since then, Vile has split from The War on Drugs, who would go on to huge success with 2014’s ‘Lost in the Dream’, and focused on more solo records that have seen him master his own brand of woozy, freewheeling and often psychedelic rock; ‘Smoke Ring for My Halo’ met with rapturous acclaim in 2011, and its follow-up, 2013’s ‘Wakin on a Pretty Daze’, troubled the right end of many a publication’s end of year best-of list.
Take one look at the man and the band in front of you onstage: all that hair, all those electric guitars, there’s a plaid shirt or two…this is going to be some kind of noisy grunge nonsense, isn’t it? Well, in short, no. Kurt Vile doesn’t do noise. He’ll give you some dope psych/folk jams, though. Vile is perhaps the most unassuming man to ever take to the stage. He hides behind his hair as he and his band The Violators run through extended versions of tracks from Smoke Ring for My Halo, not saying very much and when he does, it’s all delivered rather nervously. What matters most, though, is not that Vile is lacking “bantz”; Vile’s languid solos are what matter, as he takes a track like ‘Jesus Fever’ and lets the running time extend and bend until you don’t recognise the song anymore thanks to his astonishing liquid playing. Even when he drops the electric and picks up an acoustic guitar, Vile manages to manipulate a song so that one minute he’s Dylan, the next he’s Springsteen – this kid is talented. It’s not all completely laid-back mind you; Vile and the Violators can rock out with the best of them and there’s almost a punk element to the glorious ‘Freeway’ and it shakes you right out of the cosmic reverie the preceding tracks had put you in. You won’t come away thinking you were in the presence of a star and showman, but a Kurt Vile set gives you what you need – cracking songs.
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