Caught Live: Sam Amidon + Elaine Mai @ The Sugar Club, Dublin

Today is Elaine Mai's birthday. But if the slouched Sugar Club crowd aren't exactly leading a singsong in her honour, the Galwegian doesn't appear to let it affect her performance. Having delivered an impressive set as support to Julianna Barwick just across Stephen's Green a few months back, tonight's short but solid turn offers further glimpses of a potential that's obvious and a level of confidence that's clearly growing. Mai's finely-picked bedroom pop songs come alive as the set progresses, suggesting it would be foolish to dismiss the sometime Go Panda Go member as just another singer/songwriter with a loop pedal and a MacBook. We’re perhaps not so sure about the 'No Diggity' cover (complete with lukewarm audience participation) right at the end, but we'll happily let it slide given the night that's in it.

Where to start with Sam Amidon?... Well, right at the start I guess. The opening fifteen minutes of the Vermont native's set comprises a shaky home video of the singer rowing a boat while narrating a surreal tale involving a boy who runs away from home in the company of "a deer of indeterminate gender". Hoping to reach UCLA, the pair soon find themselves cast adrift on the water, unsure of what direction to navigate in. By the time the screen eventually fades to black, your writer feels equally lost and confused – and all before Amidon has even stepped onstage. As it transpires, his arrival actually serves to increase, rather than diminish, the weirdness factor: we're duly treated to a further barrage of meandering gibberish that confounds, annoys, but sadly fails miserably to amuse.

For what it’s worth, the routine ranges from hollers of "SENTINEL! SENNNTIIINNNEEELLL!!!" (us neither) to painful blasts of tuneless violin; from further rambled anecdotes about “Johnny Depp’s missing juicy juice”, and a covert songwriting guild that comes to his aid, to a series of mildly disturbing and completely nonsensical comic book drawings. Given that this has been billed as Amidon’s ‘I See The Sign AV Show Tour’ – and well aware of the singer’s reputation for wilfully eccentric behaviour – RW hadn’t arrived this evening expecting a conventional one-man-and-his-guitar singer/songwriter setup. That being said, the opening half of tonight's performance is quite frankly one of the most bizarre spectacles we've witnessed on a stage in nearly fifteen years of gig-going.

The most baffling and frustrating aspect of it all is that, when Amidon chooses to, y'know, actually play music, he's little short of mesmerising. Shorn of the sometimes overly-busy arrangements of his Bedroom Community cohorts Nico Muhly and Valgeir Sigurðsson, these songs – which are mostly covers of old Appalachian and Georgia Sea Island folk standards – possess a power and directness that’s frequently disarming. The thirty year-old’s earnest delivery and world-weary morality tales have understandably invited frequent Will Oldham comparisons; tonight, though, accompanied only by banjo or guitar, there’s a raw quality to his keening vocal that more closely recalls a young Jason Molina. Meanwhile, his use of vivid religious themes and imagery (most notably on I See The Sign’s venerable title track, the opening number tonight) marks him out as an even-more-God-fearing Sufjan Stevens.

Much has alrready been made of that record’s penultimate track, which sees Amidon reinterpreting a ‘lost’ R. Kelly tune (‘Relief’, from 2008’s shelved 12 Play: Fourth Quarter project). Tonight it provides a genuinely transcendent finale to what’s been a strange hour or so, the audience joining in on the song’s simple but sincere refrain of “What a relief to know that there’s an angel in the sky / What a relief to know that love is still alive”. It’s just a shame that Amidon’s undoubted gift for channelling the power of music as a guiding spiritual force won’t be our abiding memory of this particular evening.

Sam Amidon continues his Irish tour this evening (September 28) with a gig at Triskel Christchurch in Cork City, before playing De Barra's in Clonakilty tomorrow night and Galway's Róisín Dubh venue on Friday. Elaine Mai will provide support in Cork and Galway. Go here to view a gallery of Mark Earley's photos from the Dublin gig.