Wednesday 17/05/06 Adem @ The Glee Club, Cardiff

Adem Ilham is a little bit too clever for his own good. Not content with producing jazz-tinged instrumentals with his main project Fridge, or bizarrely composing soundtracks for Channel 4 history documentaries, he’s now building up a steadfast collection of plaintive indie-folk gems. Adem’s audience is limited but none the less committed to his oddball curios. His latest album, Love And Other Planets, is a concept on all things spatial and cosmic. Adem approached the stage like some bashful schoolboy but he soon found his jollity with ‘Something’s Got To Come’, a slow-burning lament that turned into a rabble-rousing hymn.

The bespectacled and bearded songwriter looked uncomfortable at best, but Adem’s geeky entourage of backing players helped him through the awkward silences. Every song had to be underpinned by a particular theme or scenario, but this made Adem feel more at home with his description of ‘Love And Other Planets’ being, “Getting dropped off at an unusual planet by your copilot”. Idiosyncratic behaviour aside, Adem showed he had more than a few tricks up his sleeve, most notable with the beatific Crashlander, a knockabout melody that was so simple yet infectiously connected. In getting to grips with his sparse audience, Adem announced that ‘These Are Your Friends’ is dedicated to all of us, partly out of gratitude for turning up and also out of respect to his cult following.

In keeping with the unbridled need for love, Adem announced he was going to move all the instruments from the stage to the front of the floor, so as to literally belt tunes out within inches of bemused fans. A brief solo followed via ‘Spirals’, revealing how fragile yet gutsy Adem’s vocal delivery is. The set concluded with the skiffled harmonics of ‘Long Drive Home’, another opportunity for Adem to let himself go and remove himself from the conventional singer-songwriter mould of self-pity and despair. Adem’s ear for a breezy acoustic strum or an eccentric rhythm is quite remarkable. By keeping a minimalist approach to live music, Adem is able to add depth and lyrical brevity to an intense surrounding. What he turns his hand to next is anyone’s guess.