Angus and Julia Stone + Declan O'Rourke + Ed Valance

With private booths in which you can slip into the shadows, bar-room tables and comfy benches, it should be a Boho venue par excellence, making it all the more irritating that tonight's admission is only gained after a pointless altercation with the jobsworth door monkey who insists the press list is closed until his 'manager' (who looks suspiciously like the barman) tells him otherwise. Eventually, musicOMH is ushered into the small ­ and at this stage still mostly empty ­ venue only to have missed half of first act Ed Valance.

This is a pity, as acoustic Ed and his plugged in buddy Simon are peddling country-tinged guitar pop in between bickering entertainingly like an old married couple. Ed looks like a younger and even more mad-eyed Wayne Coyne (which is no bad thing) with a voice that alternates between adenoidy Dylan and high-pitched falsetto, both of which manage to remain very pleasantly harmonious amid spaghetti western riffs.

They're followed by Declan O'Rourke, whose self-assured confidence makes it clear he's used to playing in front of crowds much larger than the 150 or so he's performing for tonight. Full of stage banter informing the audience that Paul Weller choosing Galileo as the song he wished he'd written makes him feel, "Well... weller", he plays new album Beyond Kyabram track for track, along the way apologising for the naffness of Love Is The Way only as an excuse to get the audience to sing along.

The intimate setting is a good advert for the juxtaposition of delicate strength found all across the album, his deep voice carrying well in the enclosed space. Even in front of this crowd, he can pull off tracks that sound like Crowded House or the Beautiful South as well as those that could be ancient hymns plucked from a twisted folk past. He thanks Jonathan Ross for already playing new single No Brakes (out on October 30th) and finishes, superbly unaccompanied, on Marrying The Sea Til Death Do Us Part - a great advert for the strength of his voice.

O'Rourke would be a hard act for anyone to follow, and unfortunately Angus and Julia aren't really up to the task. Their cutesy country falls just the wrong side of tweeness and Julia, in her '50s picket-fence dress and plastic hair band comes across too much like Cerys Matthews doing June Carter on a Stars In Their Eyes celebrity special. The addition of trumpets and the odd harmonica add to the sense of quirkiness for the sake of it and though Julia's little-girl-smoking-60-a-day breathiness is interesting, it's not enough. A large criticism is that there's not a lot of difference between one song and the next - some repetition in their set may have given it more depth.

In a small venue in front of barely more than a few dozen audience, Angus and Julia just about work but in a larger one they may not, although they're pleasant enough, a decent addition to the country-folk Troubadour tradition. For final song Here We Go Again, a Monkees-ish pop sensibility seems to sneak in just under the ribbon. If they could build on this for the future, they may be on to something.

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