Peter Silberman @ Headrow House, Leeds, 19 Apr

By rights, Peter Silberman shouldn’t be here. In 2014, his band The Antlers released what remains their latest record, Familiars. It represented an about-face from their previous album, 2011’s Burst Apart – all languid and airy where its predecessor traded almost exclusively in tension and claustrophobia. It was a gorgeous LP but hardly a sonically heavy affair, which made the irony all the crueler when Silberman was struck down, towards the ending of touring for it, with a catastrophic hat-trick of hearing conditions – tinnitus, hyperacusis and cochlear hydrops.

Given that he’s a professional musician, those issues should have been more than enough to finish Silberman. Instead, he retreated, and adapted his songwriting to his new sensitivities. The resulting solo effort, Impermanence, is a gossamer-thin affair in terms of its minimalism, and that’s precisely how it’s represented tonight. It’s just Silberman and his guitar, with the shimmering likes of Gone Beyond and Maya delivered just as they are on record. An early standout is New York, an irresistibly pretty treatise on his relationship with his home state, made all the more poignant by the decision, after his hearing issues, to swap the hustle and bustle of Brooklyn for the serenity of life upstate.

He weaves in Antlers material, too, and does so in thoughtful fashion. He’s not just thrown the hits in, instead opting for the kind of tracks that suit this stripped-back approach – the handsome lilt of Parade, for instance, or the evening’s highlight, a strikingly bare version of Burst Apart’s Corsicana. If anything, the whispery nature of the performance is the only thing holding it back – nothing to do with Silberman, of course, but it’s unfortunate that the venue saw fit to blast music in the bar downstairs, with ugly sound bleed the inevitable result.

Not that it seems to matter too much to Silberman; he’s clearly delighted to be on his own personal comeback trail after the troubles he’s faced. He laughs about a run-in with an angry Leodensian earlier that day after the drive up from London, before aptly segueing into the set closer, Ahimsa – funnily enough, a beautiful, gentle rebuke to violence. However much he might have to bend his abilities to fit his circumstances, Silberman is here to stay.