Jamie Woon is in the fresh first flush of success but it's been a good while coming. An unassuming 28-year-old with dark good looks, he first appeared five years ago with an extraordinary spooked take on the gospel perennial "Wayfaring Stranger" but then, on the recording front at least, he vanished. 2011, however, sees him busier than he's ever been and this tour is a preamble to the summer festival circuit.
Woon arrives onto a stage filled with keyboards and stands at its centre, greeted by whoops from a young crowd. He wears a black T-shirt and jeans, a loose hank of hair hanging over one eye emphasising his pin-up features. The crowd certainly has plenty of young women in it. Backed by a three-piece band clad in straw hats and baseball caps, his voice is an R'n'B croon but the music is tinted with more mode-ish electronic sounds. Woon often gets tagged as dubstep which he certainly isn't but it's easy to see why he gets lumped in with that scene. His songs have the same spacious production and the music revels in its electronic qualities, although Woon is usually playing guitar at the heart of it all.
He opens with "Street" and then moves straight into the rest of his recent debut album Mirrorwriting, gentle songs of ordinary life and romance, served up at a slow, steady tempo, polished but unpretentious. The word that springs to mind is "Balearic" for these are songs that would fit neatly into the context of an old Café Del Mar compilation, albeit the production is thoroughly modern. The guitar is put down for a couple of slowies and he uses a sampling device to overdub his own voice into quavering harmonies on "Gravity". This is seduction music but without the overt sleaze of so much late night R'n'B.
The throbbing beat of the single "Night Air" is a welcome change of tempo and is greeted with cheers of recognition but the pace never really ups. Woon does elegant very well and he has a warmth and presence that makes even his lesser songs engaging, however, I reckon he could do with some bouncier, more hectic numbers sprinkled amongst it all. The set would have benefited from an injection of, say, disco, or an outright rocker. That said, the crowd were thoroughly enamoured with what they were served and danced lazily to the single "Lady Luck" as the set came to an end. Woon returned for an encore of "Waterfront" with its self-contained lyrics about being by oneself, taking time out - "the sound on the breeze was my cradle" - and then he's gone, leaving a crowd soothed by his musical balms.
Find Jamie Woon on AmazonWatch the video for "Lady Luck"
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