Songs made for quiet contemplation

It's fair to say that last Thursday's show – a double bill of American folk singers Elvis Perkins and Willy Mason – won't have given any passing surveyors too many sleepless nights about cracks in the ceiling.

Here were songs made for quiet contemplation – music laced with melancholy and sadness. In the case of Perkins, it's not hard to understand why. A gently rising star in the US, but largely unknown here, his music has been shaped by the tragedy of losing both parents before the age of 30: his father, Psycho actor Anthony Perkins to AIDS-related pneumonia in 1992; his mother, photographer Berry Berenson, in the moment that American Airlines Flight 11 hit the World Trade Centre in September 2001.

Hardly suprising, then, that Perkins's music isn't very jolly, but at times his brand of winsome Americana proved both warm and affecting – not least on the mellow stomp of set-closer Doomsday, with its licks of brass and shuffling rhythm.

Mason's downbeat world view is a little harder to fathom. Born in New York, raised in the exclusive Massachusetts enclave of Martha's Vineyard, and with two albums of critically-acclaimed country-tinged folk to his name, despite still being the right side of 23, he's a young man with a bright future. But you wouldn’t know it from his outlook. The World That I Wanted, one of the key tracks on his recent second album If The Ocean Gets Rough, offered here with sparse delicacy, tells the tale of a father figure's decline and death.

Our Town, the stand-out number of the evening, takes umbrage at heavy-handed policing ("We caught you looking at us/And we're gonna bust you up/In our town.") Oxygen, Mason's debut single and signature tune, reserved here for a hushed, pride-of-place acoustic airing in the encore, is a semi-hopeful, semi-bleak critique of modern America ("Just need to get past all the lies and hypocrisy/ Make up and hair/ To the truth behind every face").

In theory, coming from an artist barely beyond university age (he doesn't turn 23 until November), such negativity could sound contrived and unconvincing. That it didn’t here was chiefly down to Mason's rich, gravelly baritone – a voice that would not sound out of place in a man twice his age. It left the crowd hushed and enthralled during the solo rendition of Hard Hand To Hold, and there was even a hint of Johnny Cash’s croak on the woozy country of Fear No Pain.

It's also a voice that ensured current single We Can Be Strong, played mid-set, survived the absence of KT Tunstall, who provides female backing on the record. The ensuing applause wasn't enough to shake the old venue – but it was sufficient to suggest that Mason is making slow-and-steady progress down his chosen dusty road.

Willy Mason