Mackenzie Crook - Gareth from The Office to the uninformed - rates them enough to pop along, so Iron and Wine must be getting somewhere.

Tonight’s show ends Iron and Wine’s quick-fire tour of the UK to promote latest record The Shepherd’s Dog. If they’re homesick or fed up at the end-of-tour stage, it doesn’t show as Sam Beam and his band craft out a performance of skill and guile at Reading’s beautiful Concert Hall.

Starting slowly with early album favourites Cinder and Smoke and Upwards over the Mountain, the accompanying band provide new elements to songs which previously had simply been Beam and his guitar. The effect is slightly lost though when you begin to realise that these songs are so good because it is just Beam and his guitar.

No song was spared the full band treatment, a feature which is heavily prominent on The Shepherd’s Dog, and the ability to fit a bass, a slide, a xylophone and a full drum kit on a stage no bigger than your average living room is an achievement in itself- so being able to create a sound so mesmerising in the same setting definitely deserves some credit. 

With a large portion of the new album played by a band looking extremely comfortable both with themselves and their instruments, it’s impossible to fault Iron and Wine as they knock out a technically faultless performance.

Due to such a top heavy set list, the crowd only really got going once White Tooth Man and the touching Sodom, South Georgia were played in quick succession; a stark contrast of the fast and powerful alongside the slow and mournful forcing the sleepy crowd into waking up.

The sad lack of song from previous efforts The Creek Drank the Cradle and Our Endless Numbered Days is perhaps the one downside of the night, sealing a tour where they will be treading fine line between enticing new fans and alienating old ones.

Iron and Wine have to be commended for a performance that was as technically extravagant as it was enjoyable.  Even without the old standards, there is a still a lot to take away from a performance that should see them stepping on the right side of bringing in the new fans and appeasing the old ones.