Canaan Cox 
★★★★☆
The Loft
★★★★☆
Voodoo Rooms, Edinburgh

IT’s always a fine line between interesting and boring. A lot is boring, but just about anything can be interesting.

For the first six songs of US Country Rock singer Canaan Cox’s set in a half empty room on a Friday night, it looked like a stand-off. On one side was a small crowd, mostly women. On the other was a slick and noisy three-piece and songs that rattled through a list of contemptuous emotions: “Safe to say I’m doing fine without you”. They are wannabe hits you never heard before, performed with ruthless efficiency, a certain panache, and more than a dash of cynicism.

But there’s no connection. Cox is performing over our heads to an imaginary stadium, and it’s not working. Then he does something risky. He stops. The gig gives up. He picks out the few men in the audience asking for musical taste. AC/DC someone shouts, and the band suddenly rips into half a cover, and it’s interesting again.

Cox may be stranded, halfway to fame, but he is a natural born performer, whose commitment is laced with a the self-mockery of someone who wants to be loved, and wears it on his sleeve.

He’s also wearing a man-child Gryffindor T-shirt. He whatsapps his kid in Nashville. He sees someone filming a song on their iphone, borrows it, and performs it to camera. He involves the crowd, and it’s a gift. Someone volunteers that they were at the nemesis Dublin gig when there were only 12 people. He’s never going back to Dublin, he says. Ever. And in this oscillation between the commercial calculation of the music — a kind of armour-plated Nashville Maga country rock — and the obvious shipwreck of his lofty ambitions, it all becomes intensely memorable.

The songs are, frankly, alarming, and were they hits they could easily be re-tooled into right-wing anthems: “I tell everyone I hate you” is the catchy singalong riff on Hate Me More and this is the prison he’s constructed for himself. And he’s good. It’s the commitment, the guitar playing and the tenor range, but above all it’s the way he rides the contradictions, the showmanship, the intoxication he feels for his own music, and the capacity to survive the nightmare gig. 

If you catch any of the remaining UK dates, this is fascinating to witness.

Also worth catching and with their last dates this week are The Loft, a highly entertaining guitar band who had a brief heyday in the 1980s, and now come together again to celebrate their first actual album. The Loft, you feel, are comfortable with obscurity, and have worked it into their highly ironic songs, brought to musical perfection on the stage. And just because they’ve got good lyrics that they want to get across and of which you can hear every word, doesnt mean they’re not a bangingly tight outfit, with each song polished to impressive effect, and with guitarist Peter Strickland harmonising beautifully behind Astor.

And songwriter Peter Astor, on lead vocals, is also the very spit of Jeremy Corbyn. He is utterly assured in his middle England melancholic and satirical meditations on such topics as the Sad Comedian and hilariously — and connecting with the Scottish audience — the dream of owning a campervan, along with their ’80s hits Why Does The Rain and On A Tuesday.

They are, to me, even better live than in their recordings and, while you hope in vain for a song about ethical foreign policy or wealth redistribution, or even the joys of the allotment, they deliver an efficient and amusing set.

A gig for older people perhaps, but more than worth it.

Canann Cox is on tour until May 30. For tickets and venues see: canaancox.com 
The Loft are on tour until May 30, with a Manchester date on July 31. For tickets and venues see: songkick.com