Mark Kozelek aka Sun Kil Moon will play Dublin and Bangor next year. The Californian artist, who is also a founding member of Red House Painters, will play a fully-seated show at Dublin’s Liberty Hall Theatre on Saturday, May 23 and Bangor’s Wesley Centenary Church on Friday, May 22 2020. Tickets cost €29.50 and £30 respectively and go on sale at 9am this Friday from here and here.
Mark Kozelek plays music, eats, and watches boxing matches. This is all that he does. This we learn towards the end of This Is My Dinner. This, we already knew. Let Sun Kil Moon’s ninth album, then, illuminate a few more of the obscure corners of Kozelek’s mind. His favourite Lou Reed album? Berlin. Favourite Jonathan Richman song? ‘Hospital’. Does he hate Steely Dan and The Eagles? Yes. Does he love AC/DC’s ‘A Touch Too Much’? Also yes. Will he ever eat reindeer? Definitely not. These are just a few mundane insights from the myriad details that are densely strewn…
In his fifty years on this earth Mark Kozelek has, as he informs us on this new record, lived many lifetimes. His listeners have lived a large part of them too – from his Red House Painters days in the ‘90s, through his solo work and with Sun Kil Moon, Kozelek has never shied away from baring the hard truths and hurts as well as indulging in the simple joys. Album number eight, despite being a double, is a more condensed temporal experience, recounting the same number of months in the singer’s life from January to August in 2016 while…
The name Justin Broadrick has previously been evoked by Sun Kil Moon on Universal Themes’ opening track – a gushing paean to “Godflesh’s guttural growls from hell.” Broadrick’s massively influential industrial metal band disintegrated in 2002 amidst various personal difficulties, with Jesu following in the wake of the break-up. Godlesh have since reconvened (as documented in ‘The Possum’), and it’s an astute move on Mark Kozelek’s part to change things up musically, hooking up with his long-time friend for this collaborative effort after the reflections of Benji and Universal Themes. With Jesu/Sun Kil Moon Kozelek’s lyrical ponderings are given a…
“People love me. Some people hate me. A lot of people love me, but some people hate me. Some people anonymously go on to the internet and say cruel, hateful things about me. But that’s ok. That’s ok. That’s ok because it means you’re somebody when that happens to you. It means that you’ve arrived. It means that you can lie in bed at night with a warm, fuzzy feeling in your stomach. Some people hate me and some people love me. Some people come to my shows and write big, long essays about how much they love my music…
It’s fair to say Sun Kil Moon guitarist and vocalist Mark Kozelek is a multi-faceted and somewhat temperamental individual: he wears his heart on his sleeve and bears his soul through song. He had a well documented spat with The War on Drugs last year after their sound bled on to his stage at a festival, and has even criticised his own fans for being a bunch of hipster “guys in tennis shoes” [ed: see Laura Snape’s recent piece on his on-stage response to her attempts to interview and profile the artist]. Last year’s release Benji was an emotionally wrought…
Due for release tomorrow, just over 6 months since his last record, Mark Kozelek’s seventh album under the Sun Kil Moon pseudonym – Universal Themes – is now up for streaming on his official site just one day before its official release date. Continuing on where last year’s career-defining Benji left off, all the hallmarks of his raw, sardonic musings are instantly evident in the tracklisting: 1. ‘The Possum’ 2. ‘Birds of Flims’ 3. ‘With a Sort of Grace I Walked to the Bathroom to Cry’ 4. ‘Cry Me a River Williamsburg Sleeve Tattoo Blues’ 5. ‘Little Rascals’ 6. ‘Garden of Lavender’ 7. ‘Ali/Spinks 2’ 8. ‘This Is My…
There’s a relaxed, seasonal warmth upon entering the Button Factory for tonight’s mostly seated, limited capacity show, which sees Mark Kozelek at possibly the most critically acclaimed stage of his career – almost every song performed tonight comes from the last two years of his career – due in no small part to this year’s Sun Kil Moon LP, the mortality-fixated Benji. With no support act, Kozelek ambles onstage accompanied simply by a keyboardist and electric guitarist, standing with a sole tea-towelled drumstick for his lone tom, holding a straight beat with the intent of a serial killer for the entirety…
In the first of an new series-based feature, Belfast-based writer Aaron Hamilton trawls through the very best music released in the month of January, distilling his favourites to a mere eight tracks. Whereas the first five are in no particular order, the final three are, as you might well guess, in order of consecutive greatness. Will we be humming their choruses this time next month? Check yourself then and read on now. St. Vincent – Digital Witness [Loma Vista] A second teaser to her upcoming album, ‘Digital Witness’ shows a decidedly weirder side to Annie Clark’s music. The big horns are…