Kurt Vile
Childish Prodigy
[Matador]

With a dirty buzz and a watery echo on every vocal, Kurt Vile, Philly's self-proclaimed "Constant Hitmaker" has released his second LP of fuzzed-out noise pop, this time via Matador. It's the follow-up to his debut, uh, Constant Hitmaker, and it's the kind of music that's got both bile (that's "bile" with a B!) and beauty behind it even through the delayed stadium sound present on every track, from leadoff "Hunchback" onward. It's as if he sings from one second in the past and one second in the future, a startlingly effective way to lend an all-encompassing feel to what is ultimately a low-fi effort.

Despite the raunchy recording, Vile's songs are anything but gross. The record's brighter numbers, "Overnite Religion," "Blackberry Song" and the so-gorgeous-it's-not-fair "Heart Attack," are all punchy acoustic guitar and tambourine and pretty keys and unadulterated joy. Vile breaks into psychotic falsetto intermittently, sounding deliberately and charmingly insane through all the songs' washing layers. "Heart Attack," for me the album's standout, is a small song, if that makes sense; that is, it's only a surprising chord progression and a slurring vocal delivery away from being unremarkable, but that distance has suddenly become acres and it seems now impossible that it ever could've been ordinary.

Also unexpectedly prodigious, songs like "Freak Train" deceptively bury sunshiny keys deep in a mix of suddenly driving drumming and sandy guitars and Vile's barking vocals. His sometimes Dylan-reminiscent narratives skitter across the songs' surfaces, riding the peaks and troughs of his instrumental waves, occasionally plunging completely underneath in a mumbling moment or launching high above them with a "Shit!" or a "Woo!" No smooth sailing for Vile, who takes every opportunity to subvert his listeners' expectations.

Case in point: moments like "Monkey" sound more like a lazy Tom Petty than a weird bedroomy solo project from the lead guitarist of The War On Drugs. It's arena rock heard on a terrible sound system and with a B-section more experimental than any hair band could ever hope for, which will hopefully translate well when Vile tours with his live band, The Violators. Until then, we'll have to be satisfied with this precocious effort, more mature than it sounds and certainly not vile.