Desertshore: Drawing Of Threes
Desertshore: Drawing Of Threes– While primarily being an instrumental duo from San Francisco, Desertshore‘s Drawing Threes adds the talents of Mark Kozelek to the mix. If you happened upon this band like I did and heard Red House Painters all over it, there’s a good reason for that: Phil Carney, the guitarist, played guitar in Red House Painters and Sun Kil Moon. So while this record has Kozelek moonlighting on 6 out of 10 songs, they’re still primarily instrumental… more or less.
It’s difficult not to love Kozelek’s deep, nasally vocals every time you hear them– They provide any soundtrack or instrumentation with unmistakeable depth and emotion. I’ve always considered his voice as one of the most important voices in music, period. So, naturally I find it difficult to criticize anything he does even if I don’t particularly care for it. But even though I was on the fence for Sun Kil Moon‘s last 2 records, Drawing Of Threes is different. In a lot of ways, Desertshore seizes on an instrumental simplicity that makes this collaboration work extremely well.
We may never know what the writing process was like during this record, but if the last 4 sublime, instrumental songs are any indicator, it tells me that if there wasn’t a collaboration with Kozelek, I probably wouldn’t like this enough to even bother writing anything about it. I like the simplicity that they have and I think that’s a lot of what Kozelek has been neglecting himself-of with Sun Kil Moon lately. As a result, this sounds much more like RHP, or the Kozelek of old more than the more current iteration. And with that in mind, why fuck up a good thing? Ambient Rock + Mark Kozelek = Love Forever… 7.6/10