Last weekend the lady and I braved the Sunday night sleepies to go see Mark Kozelek play at the venerable Aladdin Theater. It was a performance peppered with, how do I put it... uncomfortable moments. I'd heard tales of Kozelek's off-putting stage demeanor, of his impatience with excessive crowd noise and the like. The crowd at this show was impossibly submissive, hanging on every note the man played. Kozelek managed to alienate nonetheless. Still, he continues to be able to write a mean heartbreaker.
I wrote about it for Tiny Mix Tapes' recently revived live blog.
“Shit, I had a bunch of dirty jokes I wanted to tell,” Mark Kozelek deadpanned upon seeing a child in the front row of the reverent mid-sized crowd at Portland’s Aladdin Theater. It is itself a venue that demands some reverence, an aged and atmospheric place ideal for intimate performances such as this one. Kozelek’s most recent outing as Sun Kil Moon, last year’s Admiral Fell Promises, was a chilly and cartographic affair that sent listeners across the physical and emotional distances of the American West and through the tangled recesses of its creator’s wry and yet tortured headspace.
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