Philadelphia’s Been Good to Me, the near-title homage on Kurt Vile’s album-length valentine to his hometown, is a high time no matter where you’re from: a deliciously hazy twist on Todd Rundgren’s white-soul futurism with pillowy synthesizer, church-bell treble guitar and heartbeat drumming in a sultry-ballad stride that suggests Billy Paul’s 1972 cheatin’ hit ‘Me and Mrs. Jones’ with the Velvet Underground’s Moe Tucker on that session. At times, Vile sounds like he’s singing in dialect, crooning about a city waterway, the Schuylkill River (“Always hard to spell” and “polluted as hell”), with the marbled articulation of Murmur-era Michael Stipe.
But the greater effect, across the whole record, is universal in trance and gratitude.