In the phase that followed his 2014 landmark album Benji, songwriter Mark Kozelek's work under the Sun Kill Moon banner slowly grew from gentle indie rock into something closer to durational spoken word pieces. The storytelling style solidified on that excellent album opened the floodgates for subsequent volumes of seemingly unedited semi-poetic ruminations underscored by repetitive grooves that often felt secondary. I Also Want to Die in New Orleans isn't the most dense of Kozelek's diary-like statements (its 89-minute running time brief by comparison to 2017's synth-heavy, hours-long Common as Light and Love Are Red Valleys of Blood) but it's a demanding listen nonetheless. Over the course of seven songs which can run as long as the 23-minute album-closer "Bay of Kotor," Kozelek's lyrics get into minuscule details about a weekend at his cabin, his political views, a confusing recording session, the lamb he ate on a European tour and so, so much more. Sometimes this can feel like verbatim transcriptions of conversations or play-by-play retellings of what Kozelek did on any given day. I Also Want to Die in New Orleans is set apart from other Sun Kill Moon albums that preceded it by its jazzy inflections and contributions from saxophonist Donny McCaslin and drummer Jim White adding color to the tunes. On "Day in America," Kozelek even spends six minutes recounting a story about jamming in the studio on a riff he didn't know was a Bill Evans composition, sometimes drifting into thoughts about school shootings and high school memories as the band supports him with lilting, jazz-informed instrumentation. The audacious longwindedness of the songs and their complete inspection of every mundane detail would be fascinating, but this album follows multiple others where Kozelek's lyrics informed us of everything he ordered at a restaurant or remembered at length playing a certain city in the '90s. The musical accompaniment is interesting, switching gears and time signatures quickly, but it's often burdened by the endless stories. While Kozelek's output has been far more overbearing, these bumbling rambles aim for the transcendence that he hits at his absolute best, but are mostly tedious.