Kurt Vile Bottle It In

Following the dusky wandering of 2015's B'lieve I'm Goin Down... and the sometimes cloying 2017 Courtney Barnett collaboration Lotta Sea Lice, restless workingman Kurt Vile looked to his time in transit for his seventh album, Bottle It In. The songs here were recorded over the course of two years in various studios and locations across the U.S., and Vile assembled them between tours and road-trip vacations with his family. That sense of motion touches much of Bottle It In, an album that sees Vile extending his sonic vocabulary with more complex arrangements and drawn-out songs that wash by like changing scenery viewed from the passenger seat. By this point, Vile has settled into the finer points of his persona, that of the stony but observant psychic drifter, grinning through his disarming rock repetitions with equal parts humor, bite, and guitar solos. He wears all of it confidently on the songs where he can explore, notably the almost ten-minute two-chord ramble of "Bassackwards." Th