“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.
For this show, Mark Kozelek was as warm as Mark Kozelek gets, which is to say he at least engaged the audience, if only to make fun of them. “It’s always the guys without dates who have the book,” he remarked, a shot at a timid concertgoer holding a copy of Kozelek’s Nights of Passed Over but also an edgy bit of subtle self-deprecation. It was a theme that resurfaced throughout the evening, in the lyrics of a new song (“Had a lot of female fans, and fuck they all were cute/ Now I just sign posters for guys in tennis shoes”) and in other self-pitying barbs ostensibly directed at the crowd.
In between the good-natured (?) ribbing, Kozelek managed to play some songs; in fact, he worked impressively from his vast catalog, pulling from Red House Painters’ Old Ramon (“Cruiser”) and his consensus best-to-date, SKM’s Ghosts of the Great Highway (“Glenn Tipton”). He even did a Modest Mouse cover. It all sounded pretty great, but the performance, beset as it was by the disdain of the singer’s one-sided audience “interactions,” revealed that though Kozelek’s songs still traffic in the too-common human predicaments of alienation and heartbreak, he hasn’t yet discovered how to let his fans in.
