Yellow Kitchen is a collaboration album between American musician and singer Mark Kozelek of Sun Kil Moon and Sean Yeaton, bassist of Parquet Courts, released on June 30, 2017 by Caldo Verde Records,[3] though available for streaming shortly prior to that.
Kozelek and Yeaton met at a Dutch festival in summer 2016, and recorded and self-produced Yellow Kitchen from December 2016 to May 2017 in the United States.
Guest appearances on the album include Steve Shelley and Jim White on drums and Holly Throsby and Will Oldham (Bonnie "Prince" Billy) on vocals.
While Mark Kozelek won critical acclaim with his band Sun Kil Moon's sixth album Benji (2014),[4] on his subsequent projects, he moved towards a more esoteric and "almost Knausgårdian [lyrical and vocal] style, including long, detailed, half-sung, half-spoken descriptions of everything that he did and thought in a given span.
[5] In the opening song, "Time to Destination", Kozelek speaks harshly of the 2016 United States presidential election and its two leading candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, while on a flight to Shanghai in October 2016.
[12] Musically, the track is minimalist, taking inspiration from Philip Glass, and features resounding pianos,[10] metallic clanging,[12] oom-pah-styled tuba,[12] and a "metronomic pulse.
which quotes Steve McQueen's character Henri Charrière in Papillon (1973) and features mouth noises and tuneless yelping from Yeaton and an electronic backing.
[3] On August 3, a music video for "Daffodils" was released, in which Kozelek holds up numerous objects, including novels, albums, world currencies, a postcard, among many other things.
"[1] Dylan Montanari of Spectrum Culture rated the album four stars out of five and said that while "[d]etractors find his musical output increasingly narcissistic, but I don’t buy it.
"[10] Woody Delaney of The Student Playlist wrote that, while starkly different to Benji, "the main thing that the record proves is that he is a songwriter who truly walks to his own beat, and while some may consider it a weaker addition to his vast discography, it’s still a noteworthy deep-cut.