Sun Kil Moon @ Summerhall, Edinburgh, 10 August

Ah, the Mark Kozelek conundrum. Specifically, how bad do an artist's misgivings have to be before we give up on them altogether? No matter how crass the media-fuelled drama has gotten over the past year or so, Kozelek's appearance in Edinburgh tonight proves it's going to have to get a lot, lot worse before people begin to turn away. Playing in support of the recent Universal Themes LP, the evening is a long sold-out event; a vibrant room bursting at the seams with heat and smoldering expectation.

Sun Kil Moon’s mainstream embrace over the past 18 months or so has been something of a surprise. It doesn’t usually happen to people like him, at this point in a career – that the trip has been coupled with Kozelek’s newfound pantomime villain status has been an odd, and at times ridiculous, aside to it all. His most recent antics, in which he slandered and then sang grotesque songs about a female journalist who had been trying to interview him, weren’t just the mild acts of buffoonery that were becoming his shtick, they were plain nasty. And yet here we all are anyway.

What’s been so difficult to understand is how someone who can be so endearing and affable in one moment can be so unapologetically unpleasant in the next. There's no real shock in finding a performer presenting a differing public face than that of his artistic character but rarely is that crossover delivered with such a lack of grace or acknowledgement. This side of his personality has become such a domineering facet of his reputation that much of the show is spent questioning how we’re supposed to react to each and every moment. Is it okay to applaud the truly magnificent parts as long as we despise the casual sexism (and yes, there’s more here tonight)? Should it always be acceptable to draw the line between the artist and the person?

Tonight offers a resounding yes; an astounding, overloaded sensory experience that feels more like a piece of performance art for all the numerous extremes it presents. It’s so rare to see a musician display such sorrowful beauty in one moment and then so strongly revel in being the bad guy in the next, that the effect here is genuinely dizzying.

Walking onstage just after 9pm, he doesn't leave it again until a little before midnight, breaching the curfew by a good 40 minutes or so. Heavy-loaded with tracks from 2014's Benji LP, alongside a smattering from the new record and his cavernous back catalogue, Kozelek, the artist, is on scintillating form. Occasionally picking up the guitar, but mostly orchestrating his supporting players from seat and stand, he's captivating in the quietest passages and ferociously alive in the cacophonous peaks, of which there are surprisingly many.

From the majestic opener I Watched The Film The Song Remains The Same, the audience silently hangs on every word and drip-fed dash of instrumental colour. There are numerous highlights throughout: the heart-racing, slow-crawl version of He Always Felt Like Dancing is enchanting; the gentile cover of Nick Cave’s The Weeping Song, dedicated to Cave and his family, is perfectly poignant; then there’s the sprawling, bizarre poem about Edinburgh that Kozelek wrote earlier in the day, which he ad-libs for a good five minutes of the set while the band plays softly behind him.

Kozelek is so comfortable playing this larger than life character, a one-of-a-kind maverick who stops for nothing and nobody, that we simply shrink in his presence. The two extremes of his personality are so disparate that it’s almost impossible to accept him as a whole. In the fleeting moments we spend with him we have to choose whether to latch on to one side or the other; of course, we decide to herald the haunting figure, slumped on a plastic chair on a dimly lit stage, nearly three-hours in to a set, as he sings a devastatingly quiet song about the love of his Mother. It’s in these moments tonight that we feel moved, astonished and, perhaps, justified in our adoration.