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Vortex, London
There is an air of butter-wouldn't-melt impishness about American folk singer Sam Amidon, something teasing that keeps you on your toes. He gives this impression partly because he has the curly mop and wide eyes of an overgrown five-year-old. But it is more than that: his whole performance is built on wrong-footing his audience, in ways that make us laugh, then shock us into rapt attention.
In honour of this jazz-club venue, he opens with a tribute to the artists who may have performed here before him, a deadpan pastiche of free-form jazz that skids into a comedy skit. Then, bang: he yelps the opening lines of I See the Sign, a traditional song to which he has given a haunted, ragged new setting. If he comes across here like Will Oldham in his spare, early Palace Brothers days, the shape is only temporary: the next song, How Come That Blood, is a raucous banjo thrash in the style of 1920s singer Dock Boggs. And the next, Rain and Snow, is a murder ballad made infinitely more disturbing and eerie by Amidon's unconventional phrasing, the blankness in his voice.
Very little of Amidon's material is "original": a folk singer in the traditional sense, what he does is craft old songs in new ways. His originality – which impresses throughout – lies in the choice of song, and how he treats them. Nursery rhymes, a love tune by Big Star, gnarled gospel, an R&B ballad by R Kelly: it is all equal to Amidon. Some are rendered strange, as he experiments with the speed or volume of his singing, or fragments his guitar work; some become communal contemplations of love or the burden of being. Either way, it is startling, moving stuff.
