Wednesday 31/01/07 Ray LaMontagne @ City Hall, Sheffield

"How are you feeling, Ray?", an audience member pipes up during a quiet moment. Visibly ill at ease, Ray LaMontagne responds with a cross between a mumble and a shrug, before leaning back in his chair to mimic slitting his throat, an act you suspect the reclusive singer would much prefer to completing a sentence. It's the closest the 32-year old New Hampshire songwriter gets to banter all night.

Not the most outgoing of performers, then, but it hardly matters. In full flight, LaMontagne's voice, a mixture of wounded animal, sensitive singer-songwriter and testifying soul belter, is an intrument of unnerving power, capable of baring more pure emotion than a host of wise-cracking anecdotes or crowd-pleasing antics ever could.

The near-mythical backstory to its discovery is by now familiar. A restless childhood spent on the move from one backwater to the next with his mother and siblings led to a transient life of disspiriting dead-end jobs, until hearing 'Treetop Flyer' by Steven Stills on the radio one morning inspired LaMontagne to get into music. It's a mystery how he could've packed pipes of such magnificence for years without anyone noticing, but the straightforward shimmer of 2004's 'Trouble' certainly fits such spontaneous origins, resemble as it does a long-lost lowkey 1970's classic flavoured by a whole lot of Van Morrison, a pinch of Neil Young, a bit of the Band and a mighty dollop of raw soul straight outta 'Country Got Soul' compilations.

On paper, LaMontagne's mixture of lovelorn lamentations and manful bellowing might sound worryingly identical to the pap peddled by marauding masses of MOR monstrosities, but his stuff cuts way too deep to resort to the ersatz soulfulness of Blunt, Morrison et al. All of which makes the sensation 'Trouble' has turned out to be in the sales department such a refreshing surprise, its slow-burning success leading to a situation where LaMontagne's parading his import-only second album 'Till The Sun Turns Black' while his labels still busy pushing the debut, with the result that the bulk of tonight's 90 minute set comprises of tunes unfamiliar to a significant segment of the capacity crowd.