Vile at SXSW in 2011Mike Katzif

With his shoulder-length hair and spaced-out vibes, it is easy to see Kurt Vile as just another stoner guitarist. His music, you might think, merely serves as the soundtrack to American teenagers smoking pot in their basements. But there is much more to him that that. With depth, charm and a healthy dose of existential malaise, b’lieve i’m goin down… is Vile’s most rounded album to date, showcasing the best of his talent and pushing him into new territory.

The former War on Drugs member from Philadelphia sings with a distinctive twangy drawl but the slacker-rock label attached to his music comes from the profound sense of reflection he manages to conjure up on, for example, ‘Wheelhouse’ and ‘All in a Daze Work’. Vile appears as a solitary figure, deeply curious about the world that is spinning around him; he is the shy, talented boy in the corner peering at the world from behind his thick curtain of hair, and we are invited to join him in his reverie.

After the full-blown existential crisis of ‘Pretty Pimpin’, where he fails to recognise his own reflection, Vile is “an outlaw on the brink of self-implosion / Alone in a crowd” and later muses that “you gotta be alone to figure things out sometimes / Be alone when even in a crowd of friends”. In a world where we are constantly being pressured to connect more, to share and to broadcast every thought, Vile offers a refreshing alternative to our technology-addled lives.

Though, of course, this is no manifesto and his thinking is never quite as explicit as that. The fuzzy, reverb-heavy haziness of his music keeps these thoughtful meanderings on the plane of pure contemplation and some of the album’s strength comes from his reluctance to offer us any answers. He is just as confused as the rest of us; as he sings in ‘Dust Bunnies’, “There ain’t no manual to our minds / We’re always looking, baby, all the time”.

If this all seems a bit heavy, do not fear – Vile deftly handles these existential meditations with lashings of humour and self-deprecation. He survives the unsettling horror of struggling to recognise himself in the bathroom mirror by laughing and saying “Oh silly me, that’s just me”. He even mocks the idea of himself as a drug-taking rock star in ‘That’s Life, tho (almost hate to say)’, singing “When I go out, I take pills to take the edge off / Or to just take a chillax, man and forget about it / Just a certified badass out for a night on the town”.

But while we are used to his trademark tongue-in-cheek humour, it is the introduction of a whole new range of instruments that marks a turning point for Vile. Now his guitar finds itself accompanied by a lush instrumentation of piano, banjo, lap steel and synth. He can still hold your attention with the delicate, beguiling intricacies of his guitar playing as in ‘All in a Daze Work’, but, with its prominent percussion and instrumental experimentation, this is certainly Kurt Vile’s most captivating, thought-provoking and musically rich record yet.