Tuesday night we saw Natalie Merchant and tonight was Tindersticks: both excellent concerts, but an amazing contrast.

Natalie Merchant was presenting songs from her new album Leave Your Sleep. This turns out to be a musical setting of poems by 19th- and early 20th-century British and American poets (including Edward Lear and Gerard Manley Hopkins). The research involved has obviously been an important project for her: she introduced each song with a two-minute biographical sketch, talking a bit about what these poets mean for her, and projected photographs of them. She and one of her guitarists took turns reciting Edward Lear limericks. And during one of the encore numbers, where she encouraged the room to sing along, she stopped the show to explain how syncopation works (so we could sing the line right), then again for a workshop session on what the bridge is and what it means to a songwriter…

In contrast, Stuart Staples of Tindersticks barely said a word apart from “Thank you”, until the end of the first set. (He mumbled something that might have been “That one’s for Lhasa” after an early song, but honestly it could also have been “Lower the lights”, “Let’s do a sad one”, or possibly “I like lasagna”.) They were on overdrive: seven men on stage, swiftly changing instruments in the minute breaks between songs, with Staples mopping the sweet off his face in the instrumental breaks rather than take a pause. (They also had a wonderful solution to the problem of the drummer that speeds up: one song featured percussion by miked-up metronome.)

Natalie Merchant, on the other hand, was backed by two guitarists and a cellist. (Tindersticks featured a cellist too — who when he wasn’t playing cello picked up soprano and tenor saxophones, as well as moonlighting on triangle and tambourine. I was impressed. Plenty of people play guitar as well as whatever their main instrument is, or keyboardy things, or a bit of drums. But cello/sax is the sort of combination you only get by devoting yourself seriously to both.) It was the quietest Paradiso concert I’ve ever been to. She made a big thing about this, from her opening remark that her Belgian promotor had warned her to expect the Dutch to talk all the way through the concert, to (half-)joking complaints about the sound of a plastic cup falling later on. I can see where she’s coming from (I wonder if she envies the silence that a string quartet, say, commands?), and I will say that the quiet when it was achieved was wonderful. It did leave me feeling a bit as if she didn’t actually like her audience much, though — as if she was slightly reluctantly playing for us plebs, but only because she thought she could hector us into behaving respectably for the duration. The joking about in the encore gave a bit a similar impression: she interrupted the songs again and again, and while it was funny it also got frustrating waiting for her to get on and sing. (Again a contrast with Tindersticks: no danger of them not taking the material seriously.)

I wanted to buy Leave Your Sleep, but they had sold out. And I wanted to buy The House Carpenter’s Daughter (I have a ripped copy, and it is certainly beloved enough for me to want to legitimise it) but they didn’t have it at the stand. Usually I download what I can, and eMusic has The House Carpenter’s Daughter, but after seeing her presenting the photographs of her poets and talking about their lives, I expect great things from her liner notes. So it might just be time to visit a record store.