So last night I was out at the Fleece to see Kurt Vile, I managed to get a ticket off of someone who had a spare for the show, which had been sold out for over past two months this was partly due to the High praise Kurt had been receiving for his latest album Walk on A Pretty Daze opened up many ears to his lofi slacker down beat pop sensibilities that he had been cooking up for a number of years.

He returned to the Fleece some 2 years after taking the Violators on the road with Woods as a co headline jaunt around the UK and Europe, it very much felt like a welcome return from Kurt and rag n taggle band of Misfits. Kurt himself is not adversed to the term Misfit as the entire show was half an hour late because of Kurts bad sleeping habits and his certain un kept nature drawn heavily from the Free n easy.

What Kurt Vile has perfected is the art of the down beat pop song, I know that to many this may seem as a bit of an oxymoron, seeing as pop music is generally thought of as being up beat or happy and that the word Downer generally has well less then positive tones. But Kurt pretty much sits on the line of being positively downbeat, seating his influences somewhere between the likes of Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, The Lemonheads and Lou Reed. Watching him there was almost an element of Lou Reed about Vile’s vocal delivery, a kind of withdrawn cool drawl like as if he had just crawled out of a New York gutter.

With Kurts songs come the feeling of sedated sadness echoing the darker feelings of Young’s solitary style that compliments Viles guitar playing style. Often presenting a lowly sleuth style that I guess can really ring true with many outsiders bringing to the table his own sense of social uncertainty using his song writing to talk about His own difficulties and emotional demons.

Feel My Pain is almost like as if Vile is offering a reflective snap shot of his own life, or like page from his own personal diary delivered with an unpretentious air that may make some of life’s darker subjects much more easier to deal with.