It’s been an epic year for Kurt Vile: from the universally loved release of Wakin On A Pretty Daze, to the late night television debuts, seemingly endless touring & the inaugural Kurt Vile Day.

Dubbed the Deluxe Daze (Post Haze) version of the release of this deluxe CD caps out this banner year as Kurt Vile is quickly but quietly becoming one of the great American guitarists and songwriters of our time. The 69‐minute album, comprised of sweeping, expansive songs that are both very intimate and conversational hits shelves repackaged with new Steve Powers (ESPO) artwork and a bonus EP entitled “it’s a big world out there (and i am scared)”. The second disc includes a fleshed out “synth string” version of “Never Run Away” and two brand new tracks: the fingerpicked earworm “Feel My Pain” and the bedroom psych moves of “The Ghost of Freddie Roach”. Wakin standouts “Snowflakes Are Dancing” and “Air Bud” are also reprised here as “Snowflakes Extended” and “Wedding Budz”, respectively.

Wakin On A Pretty Daze is a timeless record that would have sounded great 30 years ago, sounds great today, and will still sound great in another 30 years from now.

Review:
Philadelphia songsmith Kurt Vile's 2011 album Smoke Ring for My Halo was a definitive shift for the artist away from home-recorded overexposed fuzz pop toward a more sprawling, textural, and most markedly introspective style. The follow-up, fifth album Wakin on a Pretty Daze, continues in this direction, but pushes the changes begun on Halo with even more articulate production, extended exploration in lengthy songs, and even deeper looks inward, if all approached through Vile's one-of-a-kind fog. Beginning with the nine-plus-minute “Wakin on a Pretty Day,” the album immediately takes the mantle from its predecessor, offering up wistful interplay between acoustic and electric guitar tones, Vile's dour mumbled vocals, and an overall emotional sense caught somewhere between the hope and promise of youth and the exhaustion of everyday life. It's this deceptively complex perspective cloaked in seemingly lunkheaded guitar heroics that makes Vile so interesting and helps keep the compositions on Pretty Daze captivating even as many of them stretch past the six-minute mark. “KV Crimes” comes on with a lazy classic rock riff but beneath its stony shuffle and sneery vocals lies a heart of both melody and a palpable sense of diminished excitement being reborn. Longer tracks like “Girl Called Alex” and “Goldtone” capture the dark wistfulness of Where You Been-era Dinosaur Jr. or the dreamy driftiness of Neil Young at his most guitar-centric peaks. Much like his former/sometimes band the War on Drugs, there's an undercurrent of working-class rock à la Tom Petty or Bruce Springsteen here (Vile even drops the lyric “Springsteen… pristine” in one song). However, with the spaced-out vaporous jams of Wakin on a Pretty Daze, it becomes clear that Kurt Vile isn't aiming to ape or even update the canon of classic guitar-based songwriters, but is very much his generation's chap­ter of the evolution of rock. Easily his most focused and accessible work, Pretty Daze is the strongest so far in a chain of releases that seem to suggest there are even greater heights to be reached.
Fred Thomas, AllMusic.com