Lean, scraggly troubadour Simone Felice grew up near the Catskill mountains. But after eight years of touring with the Felice Brothers, lauded offshoot the Duke and the King, and as an artist in his own right, he's worldly enough to be aware of customs unique to other countries. "You guys having a hen party?" he asks a particularly untameable, high-pitched corner of a boisterous Scottish crowd. "Then I'm going to sing you a sexy song."

Bye Bye Palenville, from Felice's recent second solo album, Strangers, is a deliberately paced ballad about leaving his hometown behind, so we're not exactly in R Kelly's Black Panties territory. Yet with his intense stare, careworn voice and knack for talk-singing, Felice is a master at creating a palpable sense of intimacy, which is a pretty sexy trick for any performer. Two brushes with death, two decades apart, also appear to have instilled in him an appealing fearlessness.

He doesn't get it all his own way. Backed by a cellist and guitarist, with Felice himself occasionally loping over to sing from a compact drum kit, these stripped-back versions of songs drawn from his back catalogue sometimes struggle to overcome audience restlessness. A decent proportion of them are built around a hoedown stomp, which certainly helps, though his recent, scruffily anthemic single Molly-O splits the difference between the Ozarks and DJ Ötzi.

Strangers is a haunting record, filled with rich, novelistic detail, but it's during an extended encore of covers that Felice triumphs. A ghostly reading of folk standard Wild Mountain Thyme has the audience cheering a cello solo, and Felice's drum-smashing collision of Neil Young's Helpless and Dylan's Knocking on Heaven's Door reverberates long enough for him to go on a celebratory walkabout. A last-minute win, then, but a win nonetheless.

At Cafe Indie Pendent, Scunthorpe, 18 April.

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