A modest effort from Kozelek

Alright. Time to familiarize people with Red House Painters/Sun Kil Moon leader Mark Kozelek.\nKozelek began making music with his group the Red House Painters in the early 90s. After RHP's split in 2001, the singer-songwriter-producer-guitarist went solo on an album of AC/DC covers which were so unlike the originals a radio station in Santa Barbara misinterpreted one track as a Leonard Cohen number. Then, in 2003, Kozelek released Ghosts of the Great Highway with his unplugged Sun Kil Moon project, sounding like the House Painters' folksier, sunnier alter ego.\nFast forward two years to the present, Kozelek's at it again with a sophomore album under the Sun Kil Moon moniker. That's not all. On Tiny Cities, released on his own Caldo Verde label, he covers his back-catalogue favorites of -- none of us saw this coming! -- Modest Mouse, the long-established Seattle indie-rock.\nThe music of Modest Mouse is raw, assertive and intoxicatingly tense -- a swinging sound almost entirely the polar opposite of Sun Kil Moon's style. Instead of merely taking a fundamentalist, sound-alike approach to the covers, Kozelek casts his inimitable spell on a retrospective of 11 pre-"Float On" tracks, scrapping everything but Brock's lyrics and phrasing.\nIn Modest Mouse's lyrical template he finds original inspiration. Whereas Ghosts was more a compilation of talents led by Kozelek, Tiny Cities' instrumentation is sparse, most fitting to another solo album.\nUnfortunately, Kozelek's disappointingly short half-hour of covers is hit and miss. "Tiny Cities Made of Ashes" doesn't lend itself well to Sun Kil Moon's mood; it's a sinister, head-bobbing song and the Modest Mouse grooves are sorely missed. Other times, Kozelek shows himself to be adept at expressing a different side of the same emotions. With his gently picked acoustics and ambient atmospherics, he recreates the off-kilter "Neverending Math Equation" as intimate bluesy folk. Modest Mouse delivered it as an angsty declaration; for Kozelek, it's meditative -- Modest Mouse's Buddhist cousin.\nThe rest of Tiny Cities saunters along at an even pace, unremarkable until its conclusion. Never is Sun Kil Moon's signature romantic sensibility rendered more clearly than in the group's (Kozelek's) interpretation of "Ocean Breathes Salty."\nKozelek came across Modest Mouse by accident, hearing them at a Shins show a few years back. Kozelek's decision to tackle Modest Mouse recordings is quite the magnanimous gesture, but it would have been more profound had he taken on this project before the popularity of "Float On" pounded the name Modest Mouse into us. Discovering the band's goodness through another artist's covers then would have been more exciting. While I still prefer to spend my late nights with Ghosts, one thing is certain: Tiny Cities is growing on me.