Natalie Merchant

Whelan’s, Dublin

Natalie Merchant could never be accused of playing it safe. The American singer-songwriters sold-out show at Whelan’s this week walked a tightrope of forgotten lyrics, songs started and stopped and then started again, and some of the dodgiest hand balletics you are likely to see this side of a 1960s psychedelic movie. Yet when she finished her two hours onstage she was still the apple of everyone’s eye – and rightly so.

Merchant possesses one of the great signature voices of rock, folk or whatever genre she applies it to. It can be warm and comforting, empathetic and intelligent, or strident and defiant, and sometimes all of that and more. Her onstage personality is more problematic: a touch of the diva here and there, and a constant search for that rapturous moment. This can lead to bizarre behaviour, as when she halted a song complaining that the overhead air conditioner had put her off. But when it does come together, and this happened more often than not, her voice makes time stand still.

This show was a trailer for future major events, including a concert in a larger Dublin venue and the April release of Leave Your Sleep, Merchant's first studio album since 2003. For this project, she has dispensed with her own haunting songs in favour of setting to music the work of a number of poets. In other hands, this kind of mixed media has promised more than it delivered, but the simple beauty of her adaptation of the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ee cummings and Robert Graves augurs well for the album.

She was accompanied by two acoustic guitarists, Gabriel Gordon and Erik Della Penna, as well as a cellist. In particular, Della Penna's spare, elegant playing is a perfect foil for Merchant's intensity, and the guitarists impressed on well-worn classics such as Carnival, Build Yourself A Leveeand Motherland, the title track of her 2001 album, which closed the show.

Throughout, almost like a motif, Merchant asked whether Lúnasa, the Irish traditional band with whom she has recorded, had arrived yet. She waited in vain, but Susan McKeown, a Dublin-born singer who has gained a considerable reputation in the US, did come onstage to perform a stirring duet and add gloss to an interesting night.