For an artist whose prime motivator is heartache, Dylan LeBlanc is in cheery fettle. Here to introduce his new album, Cast the Same Old Shadow – which, like his 2010 debut, Paupers Field, is weighed down by desolation and guilt – he's all smiles and Louisiana charm. "We're mostly going to play the hits, but we're going to play some new ones, too," he says, and the audience laugh with him because, of course, there are no hits – the 22-year-old songwriter works in the same spare, parched area as Neil Young and Ryan Adams but, so far, lacks the nugget of singularity that would take him to the next level.

That's not to discount his talent. LeBlanc is a raw, throaty singer whose songs balance self-absorption with an often beautiful, melancholy tunefulness. With sighing punctuation added by pedal-steel guitarist Melvin Duffy, LeBlanc melts into tracks from both albums. Emma Hartley, a story of self-medicating when love goes wrong, is a ghostly thing that conjures up Chris Isaak, and he's drowned in booze and melancholy on 5th Avenue Bar. At the end of the latter, his head pops up, all smiles again – the man is incredibly resilient, or a master showman.

He jokes that the title of new song Part One: The End "sounds like Indiana Jones, or something", a jolting reminder that he was born in 1990. You'd never guess, otherwise; there's no link to the present in these timeless songs, or in the three cover versions that finish the show: Bob Dylan's Lay Lady Lay – "my grandfather sang this to my grandmother when she was cooking, the only example of true love I ever saw" – Al Green's Let's Stay Together and Young's Ohio. "I'm just hoping to God people enjoy it," he says of the album and, for his sweetness alone, he deserves nothing less.