When Kurt Vile first heard a demo called “Classic Love,” written by his friend Luke Roberts and recorded with Kyle Spence, he thought it sounded like an old country classic, the kind that’s been covered by everybody in Austin and half of Nashville. Believing it belonged on oldies radio, he helped them flesh it out and included their final version on his latest EP. The song has the nonchalant stroll of so much of his music, and the melody suits his placidly innovative playing and heavy-lidded vocals perfectly. More than that, though, Vile might have been responding to the way it slyly subverts our expectations of a song with this particular title. A classic love is defined not by its longevity or exclusivity but by its transience and the damage it leaves in its wake: “It was a one-of-a-kind classic love,” he sings. “Just like a sunset, because it fades out… and goes away.”
It’s a bittersweet sentiment, an admission that we’re defined by failed relationships as well as successful ones and that most love exists in the past tense. It’s a memory to be turned over in our minds for the rest of our lives. Vile, Roberts, and Spence, along with Harvey Milk’s Creston Spiers, who plays various instruments—are alive to the melancholy of that message, but they don’t force it. The song succeeds because they let that sad epiphany just hang in the air.
And then the song actually fades out. Right as Vile steps into what sounds like it could have been a casually epic guitar solo, the song goes away. I still can’t decide if it’s too clever or just clever enough—an age-old issue with Vile, who uses a stoner patois to deliver funny lyrics that coalesce into weirder, heavier truths. That fadeout sounds like a self-conscious ellipsis, and it can’t help but take you out of the song’s reverie. Curiously, this EP’s other version of “Classic Love,” subtitled “kv version,” ends more simply, with some lovely guitar notes that dissipate in the air. It’s a different kind of fading out, and this version of the song sounds generally less polished, less shimmery. It wouldn’t get played on the radio, but it’s more closely engaged with the contradictions of classic love.
Perhaps I’m making too much of the way this song ends, but Vile invites such scrutiny. His arrangements and productions are sneakily sophisticated, and his delivery splits the difference between clever and grave, zoned out and locked in, sharply funny and unbearably sad. (This is the guy who recorded one of the finest expressions of alienation from self and called it “Pretty Pimpin.”) That inscrutability makes him a fine collaborator, whether he’s playing with the War on Drugs, writing with John Prine, recording with Courtney Barnett, or making an EP with Roberts. A Nashville singer-songwriter who released a handful of records in the 2010s, Roberts drifts into the background of this EP, a second guitar more often than a second voice, although he does take a verse on “Hit of the Highlife.” His voice is gruff, a kind of bark. He might bite down too hard on the word “Nashvegas” but he sells the next line like a comedian with a tight five: “So much [for] music city. Sometimes I think it’s just a bunch of cowboys on scooters.”
That song, with its airy synths and minor-key friction, foregrounds its grim restlessness as the men trade verses like they’re passing a 40-ounce. It’s the dark heart of this EP, almost too heavy for such a slight compilation: just five songs, including two versions of the title track. (Why not throw in the original demo that caught Vile’s ear?) It’s rounded out with a new-ish version of Vile’s old song “Slow Talkers,” from 2008’s Constant Hitmaker, that streamlines the finger-picked theme and sheds a bit too much of the weirdness. Better is the closing cover of Beach House’s “Wildflower,” which strips down that band’s wall of sound to some gentle, rhythmic strums. Vile and Roberts have toured together in the past, which fits because Classic Love has the vibe of an old-fashioned tour-only release. Its charm lies in its fans-only slightness, in its focus on one or two simple ideas rather than several more complex ones. Perhaps a little you-had-to-be-there exclusivity would have given it a bit more luster.
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