"If you spend enough time with the new Sun Kil Moon album Benji, there is every chance that you will end up crying sooner or later. The first time I misted up to the album, it was during a relatively innocuous moment. “I Love My Dad” is one of the jauntier songs on an album full of haunted, death-obsessed songs, but it’s still the one that did it to me. And it did it to me because of the moment where Mark Kozelek (the man who is Sun Kil Moon; it’s not a band) sings, “When I was five, I came home crying from kindergarten cause they sat me next to an albino / My dad said, ’Son, everyone’s different, you gotta love ’em all equally’ / He said, ’You gotta love all people — pink, red, black, or brown’ / Then just after dinner, he played me the album They Only Come Out At Night by Edgar Winter.” I heard that album a few times before it occurred to me that Winter, the ’70s rock shredder, was albino, and that playing the album was Kozelek’s dad’s clumsy attempt to demonstrate that all people have worth. I cried because this is such a deeply human, fumbling, potentially embarrassing attempt to show your kid a massively important truth. I cried because I’m the same way; if either of my kids ever does the same thing, I’ll probably play them the album Shadows On The Sun by Brother Ali. I also cried because Kozelek sings elsewhere in the song that his father would beat the shit out of him when he was a kid but that the two of them have made peace with it over the years. Benji is full of complicated moments like that: Scenes where tragedy and dumb, inhospitable human behavior and familial love and childhood memory all intersect. It’s an impossibly rich and beautifully written album that drips with loss and regret and love. And after listening to it constantly for a month or two, I feel like I’m only beginning to appreciate it".- By Tom Brieham of SteroGum
Your host this week is JUSTIN COX
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