Cameron Avery @ Deaf Institute, Manchester, 12 Apr

It’s hard not to feel that spending the majority of last year in the company of Alex Turner and Miles Kane has done Cameron Avery more harm than good. As you would expect, tonight’s set consists almost entirely of cuts from Avery’s debut solo LP Ripe Dreams, Pipe Dreams, but the Tame Impala bassist does little to elevate many of the songs from their recorded counterparts. It’s painfully clear that Avery has little to prove at this point in his career – and thus comical melodramatic overkill ensues.

Thankfully, a number of songs are sublime. Album closer C’est Toi finds Avery – he and his band clad all in black and minimally lit, a million miles from Tame Impala’s stratospheric set-up – at his very best. It’s here that Avery is at his most convincing, looking up to smirk when his sharp falsetto is met with the kind of cheer that's usually reserved for egotistical solos that forcefully demand it. Disposable executes Scott Walker cool with relative ease, too.

Sadly, large parts of Avery’s set fall flat. The pauses between the deadpan couplets that make up Watch Me Take It Away’s verses are drawn out à la Alex Turner at his most irritating, and some excruciatingly forced chat between songs (“This song is about someone who broke my heart”) comes off as hugely melodramatic and synthetic. His stage presence is off-putting too, saturated with stares into the horizon and shirt-pulls that overkill the drama in his music to near-comical levels. Everybody in the room knows that Cameron Avery is bafflingly talented, but tonight does little to prove it.