A raw, worldy album grounded in Ohio

The state of Ohio has a mixed history in song. The states lacks the vistas of California and Colorado - its tallest point is just 1,550 feet above sea level and topped by a career center. Even our Great Lake is shallower  and browner than the rest.

Some Ohio songs hit the mark more than others. The National's Bloodbuzz Ohio  comes to mind. The band members have Ohio roots and like many who've left the Buckeye State, we know the feeling of "But Ohio don't remember me."

Too often the song has little to do with Ohio in any tangible way, or it focuses on the state's darker history. On Youngstown, Bruce Springsteen tells of the industrial city's rise and fall, but it's an outsiders' view of events. For Neil Young, Ohio is a snapshot of ugliness, immortalizing the Kent State massacre in a few poignant verses. The same holds true for REM and Cuyahoga, which uses the heavily polluted river as an environmental rallying cry instead of a punchline.

You can't say that about Sun Kil Moon's Benji, which songwriter Mark Kozelek populates with the often forgotten people of eastern Ohio.

Ohio is more than its three big cities and half-dozen medium-sized burgs. It's more than college football and long-suffering pro franchises. It's more than the most swinging of swing states. Ohio marks the shift from Appalachia to Midwest farm country. Its Lake Erie islands are a place apart, a touch of spring break tattooed with glacial grooves.

Kozelek channels an Ohio ignored in the mainstream and lucky if it garners a presidential candidate visit every four years. He strums and sings of cousins and uncles killed in fires, old men heading to prison for mercy killings, scarred friends and his aging parents. Under his Sun Kil Moon moniker, he has explored Ohio in song, but never so intimately. Here, everyone is raw and wounded.

I grew up on the edge of the landscape he recreates, ensconced by the banality of the suburbs, surrounded by the newly wealthy and the cruel legions they spawned.We lived there but never fit there. We endured, but family activities needed to be cost-conscious.

What to do with children and little money? We drove out to the country, which is not hard to do in most of Ohio. Lake County turned rural quickly and south in Geauga County, we ran into horse and buggies near Middlefield, one of the world's largest Amish towns.Beyond the Amish, we came to Appalachia. On weekends, we drove to the south and east, sometimes hitting Pennsylvania or even the tip of West Virginia's middle finger. We might get ice cream, stop at an antique store or watch my parents pick up a few out-of-state lottery tickets. We traveled the roads  spanning the towns of Benji. We didn't judge. We just observed.

Kozelek does more than observe. Benji struck a flame, lighting up memories long resigned to the brain's darkest folds. He unloads in the first song, Carissa, an ode to his second cousin who died in a horrific accident - an aerosol can exploded in the trash. he barely knew her but still feels the weight of her death. Someone else might make light of losing two relatives to exploding aerosol cans, but Kozelek gives his subjects dignity. Carissa might have been pregnant at 15, but she died a mother and a nurse at a Wadsworth hospital. There's no punchline in a sudden loss like that.

Just like that aerosol can, the album goes off with a bursts of raw emotion. Micheline relates a story of a girl who "took a different bus to school," the townspeople who loved her and the dirt-level man who took advantage of her desire to be loved, stealing her savings.

The subject of Jim Wise, a friend of Kozelek's dad, shot his wife in a mercy killing only to have the gun jam when he turned it on himself. It's true story, with the names changed slightly. It would still be brutal if it weren't fiction ---  mercy is not a legal defense in Ohio murder cases. The real Wise died in prison less than a year after sentencing, so Kozelek captures a fragile man at a rare moment.

There are many lines I can't shake. Like most listeners, I knew the scarcest details about the murderer in Richard Ramirez Died of Natural Causes. Kozelek sums up being a kid in a world where such creatures sometime emerge. With the death of a murderer, he sings, "These things mark time and make us pause, and think about when we were kids scared of taps on the window, what's under the bed, what's under the pillow."


The Ohio setting of most songs does not make Benji less universal. Some songs touch on Los Angeles, touring in Europe and the Far East, but the deepest cuts come from the songs rooted in Ohio. If anything, Kozelek taps into feelings common to us all as we age, even if we're aging far from the Ohio we cannot leave behind.