A man for whom a three-minute pop song is an alien concept, Howe Gelb has been a journeyman musician for almost 20 years. He has been involved with a large variety of like-minded people along the way, people who have no truck with the corporate, well-rehearsed mindset of successful rock bands. Gelb returned to Ireland last Sunday, following a bemusing gig at the recent Kilkenny Rhythm & Roots festival with his band project, Giant Sand. Where that gig was an object lesson in challenge and surprise (not always pleasant ones), Gelb in a solo capacity was calmer, funnier and less intense.

Working with an acoustic guitar, piano, a range of tape recorders and samplers, and a deliberately distorted microphone (not as pretentious as you might think) Gelb viewed the gig as a workshop and the audience as participants. This stance was admirable in the context of performance art (which is essentially what this was), and a notion that the audience seemed particularly taken with.

There was a degree of conceit, however, that even Gelb couldn't disguise, a disregard for normality scuppered by a light air of artistic superiority. This was all the more apparent when he occasionally played it straight: his "normal" songs sound just fine, his piano-driven ballads superb. The experimental touches were salad dressing. Scrape it off and then perhaps we'd really see and hear what Howe Gelb is like.