Music review: Vance Joy

Academy, Dublin

This Melbourne folkie seems on the brink of a meaningful breakthrough, with his underdog ballad ‘Riptide’ basking in heavy airplay. He arrived at a sold-out Academy days after his debut on the TV show, Later…With Jools Holland. Both that turn and his first Irish performance highlighted the 26-year-old’s strengths and weaknesses: he is enormously impassioned, blessed with a beautifully earthy quaver — and yet, there’s an overspill of sincerity in his material that can feel cloying if you’re not in the mood.

As it happened, the overwhelmingly female attendance was very much in the mood, as curly-haired Joy — real name James Keogh — mooched from the wings, bearing a guitar and a widescreen pout.

His pin-up potential was clear — especially when he delivered the brooding first line of ‘From Afar’, a glimmering dirge that locates the singer somewhere between 1970s protest folk and the jaunty acoustica of Mumford and Sons. When he spun a line such as “I’m afraid of pretty girls and starting conversations”, you could practically hear hearts melting around the room.

Meticulously assembled and often exceedingly hushed, in truth his music requires a reverentially attentive audience — which wasn’t quite what awaited at the Academy. Here, there was a sense that some of the nuance was scraped away — what was left was perfectly fine, but it didn’t quite cast a spell.

Of course, everything changed when he reached for ‘Riptide’ — soaring and sonorous, it is already his anthem. It may soon, you suspect, be his passage to the big-time.