Recap Neil Halstead, March 14 at the Walnut Room

Surfers apparently love shoegazers. It’s hard to pinpoint how British singer-songwriter Neil Halstead earned a reputation as a beach-bum troubadour, signing to Jack Johnson’s label Brushfire and emerging as an acoustic-guitar hero to the kind of guys who wear hookah necklaces and are given to calling you “bro.” Halstead was the driving force behind the pioneering shoegaze band Slowdive, whose music sounds more like a rainy afternoon or a voyage into space than a day at the beach. But at some point—likely during his days with the folky Mojave 3—he stripped away the layers upon layers of noise and digital effects and just let his voice come through. Halstead’s set at the Walnut Room Saturday night consisted mostly of barebones acoustic narratives that managed to be confessional and personal without sounding whiny or contrived. The stories he told in song—the fragments of voices and details about relationships that came through in each line—were delivered with an air of effortlessness. He made the simple seem poignant. Another singer might have sounded crass declaring, “You always were really good at getting high / for someone so small,” but from Halstead it was an intimate detail in an unabashed love song. At one point Saturday night Halstead's songs started to blur together; there were no major variances in tempo or instrumentation throughout the set, which could have been a problem in a room like the Walnut where most of the audience was sitting down. But Halstead seemed to know when to call it. At the end of the set he quietly said thanks and disappeared amid satisfied—albeit somewhat subdued—applause, leaving the audience with visions of tender romance and, of all things, the perfect wave for hanging ten.