Woe betide anyone who attempts to fight off Fionn Regan's seduction. He fires off lines such as "Let me be your crushed pill" with the messianic, raging intensity of early Waterboys' Mike Scott. No wonder he has the crowd hanging on his every word. The young Dubliner's debut, The End of History, is receiving rapturous comparisons to Nick Drake and Bob Dylan: he both lives up to these and overturns them. His words have the romance and vitriol of his predecessors but he adds his own turn of phrase and a modern sense of futility and panic. "When you're down in the rubbish," he spits, "You'll be pushed in the back of a van with a bag around your head."

With his bowl cut and rugged good looks, Regan looks like Herman Hermits' Peter Noone after a good hiding, and can take you from intensity to hilarity in a blink. He does things with an acoustic guitar that are almost certainly illegal, and some of his lyrics are so wonderfully suggestive that even the artist struggles to keep a straight face. "Step out of your dress and I'll wear you like a hood," he grins in The Underwood Typewriter, as he is joined by a female backing vocalist clutching a huge glass of wine who, for the moment at least, holds on to her outfit.

Bolstered by Noisettes drummer Jamie Morrison and, inevitably, another girl on harmonica, the lines flow between songs as well as in them. He breaks a fingernail and talks of "nibbling it - as you do - on a Monday night, hanging round the bus stop".

It's almost a relief to discover that he is at least disastrous at one thing: removing the top from a bottle of mineral water. "I lost my powers," he says, struggling with the lid. On the basis of tonight, it will take a lot more than a plastic bottle to stop him.

· At Louisiana, Bristol, tonight. Box office: 0117-966 3615. Then touring.