From gifted McRae, a devastating set

A well-dressed man sitting alone at the bar in the Paradise Lounge on Thursday spent an hour with his eyes squeezed shut, mouthing the words to devastating songs. It was an odd, exhilarating sight -- a small but salient detail that only begins to describe the pleasure of spending an evening with the British singer-songwriter Tom McRae.

For people who attend concerts with notebooks and pens, part of that pleasure was the compulsion to entirely abandon the critical task at hand and just scribble song lyrics. In a genre saturated with earnest journal entries and assembly-line heartache, McRae is a real poet. Never mind that he looks like Malibu Ken. He's dangerously disappointed, as wise as an old man, and able to arrange words with the incisiveness and grace that lands an artist a midweek residency in a modest nightclub -- playing, McRae noted, over pizza being baked and drinks being poured and the louder and slightly more successful act in the bigger room next door.

Despite the historically disproportionate correlation between musical gifts and commercial rewards, McRae (a recent transplant to New York) has just signed a record deal with Sony/BMG, which is surely banking on a left-field success for its new acquisition along the lines of Damien Rice, another dark soul with a lovely tenor who against all odds is moving product.

McRae, a wry, soft-spoken front man who returns to the Paradise Lounge on Thursday, is ready for his close-up. His recent set featured a fistful of songs from 2000's self-titled debut (which was nominated for Britain's prestigious Mercury Music Prize) and 2003's ''Just Like Blood." And while McRae's recorded music, especially on the second album, has suffered at the hands of overeager orchestrators, his live show was a model of ambient minimalism. The only accompanist was Oli Kraus, a cellist who tours with Beth Orton and Ash and who -- armed with an amplifier and effects pedal -- rewrote the rules of his instrument.

With Kraus's cello shape-shifting into savage electric guitars and trippy synthesizers, McRae, an acoustic guitarist, cherry-picked notes for maximum gorgeousness. The pair butchered hope and dismantled dreams with such well-titled monuments to unraveling as ''End of the World News (Dose Me Up)," ''You Only Disappear," and ''The Boy with the Bubblegun" The latter sounds vaguely whimsical on paper and did for a while onstage, but by the time McRae wrapped his golden throat around the final refrain -- ''I'm the boy with the bubblegun/with work to do/If songs could kill/This one's for you" -- a portrait of the artist as great destroyer had taken shape. McRae's triumph -- the ultimate goal, really, of any singer-songwriter -- is that he made us want to go down with him.

Joan Anderman can be reached at anderman@globe.com.

Tom McRae
At: the Paradise Lounge, Thursday