Reviewed on Monday March 23

Sun Kil Moon, AKA the Mark Kozelek Show, are riding high at the moment, thanks to last year’s Benji landing on every best-of list imaginable. So how did his two-and-a-half-hour victory lap in Sydney begin? With a demand for less air conditioning, low lighting, and a rant about Thai food giving him diarrhoea. As new fans have realised, Sun Kil Moon are recognised as much for their music as they are for Kozelek’s antics onstage. Everything Kozelek said and did made it impossible to read him, which created a confused though jovial mood in the room.

Bringing with him on this tour just an additional drummer and keyboardist, with Kozelek himself occasionally playing acoustic guitar but most of the time preferring to keep the beat on a floor tom while he sings, he creates stripped-down, beautiful mood music that conjures up the same feelings every time; nostalgia, melancholy, and an urge to call your loved ones. It’s incredibly effective, and the reason he has maintained a fan base for close to 25 years.

In between songs, the audience got a chance to make sense of the man responsible for such beauty through loosely defined ‘banter’, which mostly revealed him to be a horny, middle aged man. This was made clearest through new song ‘Nando’s Chicken’. Played early in the set and introduced as a rejected jingle for the food chain, it details how Kozelek fantasised and had a wet dream about a young girl working at a Nando’s across the road from his hotel when he was touring Australia. The song makes many references to other indie musicians, more mentions of Thai food (half-sung in an Aussie accent), before culminating in the admission that he comes back to Australia not for the money, not for the fans, but to have chicken in that same Nando’s restaurant.

Ostensibly a joke song, it was nevertheless a Sun Kil Moon song that incorporated the same elements from his other much-loved tunes. He followed that up with the infamous ‘War On Drugs: Suck My Cock’, which begged the question – are these songs meant as jokes? If they are, did they need to be ten minutes long?

With the ever-present low lighting and the minimal band set-up, two-and-a-half-hours was probably too long to maintain a show. Sun Kil Moon largely deal in sadness after all, and no-one wants to feel sad on purpose for that long. Ultimately, though, it was a rewarding experience hearing nine songs from one of the best albums in recent history live, and getting to be in the presence of Kozelek, the definition of an enigma.

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