David J Roch – Komedia, Brighton 24/02/11

As any Wild Beasts fan will tell you, the falsetto is easily the most polarising of vocal techniques – and it’s usually something of a relief to find that the singer delivering the high-pitched warble is also in possession of an authoritative baritone. As it is with David J Roch – pronounced “Roach”, surprisingly – playing tonight without the full band we’d been expecting (not enough room for a third drum kit onstage thanks to headliners British Sea Power’s percussive enthusiasm, apparently.). His is a voice that soars, swoops, cracks and captures in all the right places.

So we just get a self-effacing gent, a guitar, a just-so haircut and, oh my, those pipes – the ones that’ll be Roch’s eventual fortune, should such things be of any importance. It’s probably overstating slightly to dub him “Nino Simone” but there’s a definite air of the down-beaten gospel truth-sayer about him. We only get five songs tonight, the singer trying his darndest to pierce the hubbub of the slowly growing crowd, most of whom are still stuck outside. But by the time he reaches ‘Bones’, we’re fair enraptured.

“I’ve got these bones held in place with skin/I don’t need them/I’ll sell ‘em you cheap,” is a line that should really sound amusingly inappropriate coming from the mouth of one so relatively young (he’s comfortably south of 30) and yet the preoccupation with the macabre sits snugly on Roch’s shoulders. Rumour: he actually works as an undertaker. Fact: a Bad Seed produced his album, called (with no great surprise) Skin and Bones. It’s all coming together.

When Roch unfurls his high-register tenor on ‘The Devil Don’t Mind’ the room seems to swell. He’s given up playing his guitar as anything other than a percussion instrument; when he does return to strumming, it’s with the impassioned urgency of a Gipsy King, or (if you like) The Cure’s ‘The Blood’. The growing audience seems to embolden him, even if the front rows are clearly staking their claim for prime position at BSP by sitting in a campfire circle.

Confident but not cocky in the slightest, Roch’s roots are in Sheffield and you could say it shows in his disarming charm and sweetly unembarrassed willingness to sing the trumpet part on ‘Peace With The Devil’ (yes, Satan again). There’s a touch of the medieval about his chord progressions and demeanour, projecting an aura that’s elegiac yet optimistic. Five songs ain’t enough, that’s for sure.