Gig review: Willy Mason, King Tut’s, Glasgow

While a sellout crowd delivering numerous word-perfect singalongs clearly testified that 28-year-old Massachusetts native Willy Mason is already doing very nicely for himself, ever since scoring a surprise UK Top 30 hit with Oxygen back in 2005, the overriding impression was of an artist who – if he stays the distance – just might mature into a genuinely major musical force.

Willy Mason

King Tut’s Glasgow

Star rating: * * *

In part this was down to his precociously deep, roomy, weathered-sounding voice, whose timbre and inflections at times evoked a young Chris Smither, Kris Kristofferson or John Prine. Such illustrious echoes also derived from Mason’s similarly loose yet purposeful songwriting style and core country/blues affiliations – influences spiked with a teenage diet of Nirvana and Rage Against the Machine, overlaid on his folkie parents’ early imprint.

Although he’s touring to coincide with the release of his third album Carry On, out today, Mason devoted much of his set to older material, opening with the plangently bluesy Gotta Keep Movin’ – which opened his 2004 debut, Where the Humans Eat – and proceeding via several more tracks both from that LP and its successor, When the Ocean gets Rough.

As Oxygen most popularly made clear, together with other songs like We Can Be Strong, Mason is strong on catchy choruses and defiantly or idealistically uplifting sentiments, and while the results are sometimes somewhat musically repetitious, and/or lyrically hackneyed, he comes across as strongest of all on interesting promise.