Badman Records
2001
What's Next To The Moon
About This Album
Like his solo debut, Rock 'N' Roll Singer, Mark Kozelek's second album sounds at times like it could be channeling the spirit of Nick Drake. That would typically be a less than surprising depiction considering the terrain, both sonic and emotional, that he has tread throughout his career. But it is an absolutely bewildering discovery when you stop to consider that What's Next to the Moon consists entirely of covers of the heavy, raw riffage of Bon Scott-era AC/DC, for whom "subtlety" didn't even exist as a word. Kozelek, on the other hand, has made an art form of it, and he does nothing less than that on this mesmerizing transmogrification. He is no stranger to idiosyncratic covers, reworking tunes in the past from sources as far afield as Yes, Kiss, and the Cars alongside more like-minded artists such as Neil Young and Simon & Garfunkel. And Rock 'N' Roll Singer already included three AC/DC songs stripped down to their acoustic bones. A whole album of them, however, is startling. Armed with a guitar and his voice alone, Kozelek essentially turns What's Next to the Moon into an acoustic folk/blues album. If you knew nothing of the songs' geneses, they could easily be mistaken for Blind Lemon Jefferson or Leadbelly covers, or perhaps something from the folk revival, Fred Neil or Leonard Cohen (a KCRW radio executive, in fact, insisted the title track was a Cohen song when Kozelek played it first during a live appearance, several years before).
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,5,6,8 and 9)

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