The ICA is the latest venue to leap aboard the folk revival bandwagon, with tonight's show launching a regular club night called Roots and Shoots. Yet among the prog-roots and folktronica experimentalists of the emerging scene, James Yorkston is a decidedly old-school troubadour.

Yorkston's band, the Athletes, are never likely to be mistaken for Aerosmith, and here he jettisons even their low-key accompaniment for a solo acoustic performance. So mellow is the vibe that he mocks his own born-to-be-mild demeanour, opening with a hushed approximation of Motorhead's Ace of Spades.

His last album, Just Beyond the River, was so blanched it bordered on anaemic, but Yorkston is a quietly compelling performer. The ICA audience sit rapt and cross-legged for the spectral Shipwreckers, a position they maintain for the remainder of the evening.

Nick Drake is clearly a touchstone for Yorkston, and his songs are similarly often poised at the cusp of relationships headed downwards. Banjo No 1, a beguiling tale of two damaged people seeking refuge in each other, has an undertow of exquisite regret.

Yorkston may be a self-effacing figure but This Time Tomorrow, an account of a casual shag, seethes with baleful self-loathing like an acoustic Arab Strap. The fragile Surf Song is the best song about skinny-dipping since REM's Nightswimming.

As with Nick Drake, you need to be in the mood for these pastel-tinted, solipsistic reveries, but Yorkston is clearly a talent of rare intensity. There may be something in this folk revival after all.