Kurt Vile 'Childish Prodigy' (Matador) Released 05/10/09

I’ll admit it, I’ve been ignoring Kurt Vile purely on the basis of what he’s called. Faced with a name like that, it’s been easy to dismiss the guy as either a painfully pretentious art-rocker dissecting vintage cabaret stompers or, even worse, a novelty act with a rapidly wilting recipe to elicit a few chuckles.

Turns out both the name and the act are for real; no gimmicks, no tricks, no daft aliases, but a Philadelphia-based multi-instrumentalist who’s been clutching an instrument for as long as he can remember. Vile’s been peddling his lo-fi wares for a good couple of years now on the outskirts of obscurity to an ecstatic reaction from the obsessive types who’ve had the dedication to hunt down his hard-to-find releases down. This Matador debut ups the ante by toning down the tape hiss and featuring touring band the Violators alongside Vile’s trademark solo excursions, with the expectations obviously set somewhere along the ‘future phenomenon’ stage.

Is ‘Childish Prodigy’ worth all the fuss? It is, and it isn’t. When it works – and this is down to the listener’s mood and powers of concentration as much as the actual music – it’s genuinely spellbinding stuff. The finger-picking folkie fare works the best, with the likes of the indignant ‘Dead Alive’, the ramshackle prettiness of ‘Overnite Religion’ and the spiralling ‘Heart Attack’ providing particularly effective journeys into the inner core of hazy fuzziness. Best of the band stuff’s good, too. ‘Hunchback’ welds Vile’s bad-attitude, Iggy Pop-ian drawl to what sounds like Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers having a go at mimicking the wasted energy of ‘Raw Power’, whilst the pissed-off ‘Freak Train’ places a Dylan-esque snarling rant on top of a hypnotic chug-a-long clatter, before dissolving into a storm of space-trucking saxophones.

But it’s hard to overlook what the album lacks. Vile prefers atmosphere and mood to variation and hooks, resulting in a drought of substantial songs of the type that leave a lasting impression towards the end of the album. And that’s a fairly fatal flaw for an artist who spends half the record in what is essentially solo folkie mode, albeit a very twisted and generously decorated take thereof. That much-raved ditty about a Blackberry, meanwhile...well, you can either take it as a brilliant example of the mundane everyday of communications devices and such gatecrashing the creative kingdom of song, or a very public admission that the famously prolific songwriter has well and truly ran out of stuff to write songs about.