Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Mark Kozelek At The Arts House

Alot of us grew up with haunting vocals of Mark Kozelek in Red House Painters and Sun Kil Moon. Those songs helped me through many dreaded school examinations. I was glad that Mark Kozelek made it to Singapore tonight. It hasn't been the smoothest of trips to the region for him, but he is here in flesh, with a guitar on stage.

Never mind about the terrible sound system and too much reverb going on in that main Chamber of The Arts House. It was a little sobering when I realized that the organizers didn't bother about setting the soundstage because I presume, they figured it was just a guy with an acoustic guitar. SIGH. I don't know anything about lighting, but the lack of lighting control spun the Chamber into darkness with a weird spot on the singer. That certainly induced me to fall into a half-snooze through at least 3 songs.

Mark Kozelek was clearly not in the best of moods tonight. But he played for 2 hours. That was something. He's lost the angst and fire, but he's still got the voice, perhaps better, deeper and richer. When I listen to the old cds and compared it to what I heard, the voice is markedly different. The age has changed something. The gig was, a tad underwhelming. I suppose it's because I was hoping to re-create some of that teenage magic, but it didn't happen.

The fishball kway teow soup and laughs at lunch provided enough horsepower to plough through powerpoint slides and papers till 7.15pm before I had to zoom off for this gig. By the time it ended at 10pm, I was appropriately starving. It's been a while doing the supper circuit. Some friends managed to also have pizza and beer at Timbre before the gig, but we all still went for nasi lemak and teh-o-limau-ais at Spize.

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