The last time Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy played in Vienna was back in 2008, on a blazing hot summer’s evening at the WUK. The heat inside the Arena for Will Oldham’s return visit in July was equally oppressive, but on this occasion Oldham and his immaculate band seemed more interested in keeping a lid on the atmosphere than in raising the onstage temperature by more than a degree or two. This was a jaunty, amiable canter through the Oldham back catalogue (with a sprinkling of cover versions) that did a great job of showcasing his immense talents as a songwriter, but did so at the expense of the disquiet that lurks at the heart of Oldham’s best work.

I freely admit to being no great authority on Oldham’s work, having only climbed on board with 1999’s breakthrough I See A Darkness LP and been a follower up to and including 2006’s troubling The Letting Go. Having doubled back and devoured the earlier, devastating Palace Brothers/Music records, I pretty much jumped off the bus with 2008’s Lie Down in the Light, a perky set that left me bemused rather than (as I probably should have been) cheered by Oldham’s apparent eagerness to move from darkness into light. A run of inconsequential later releases (2011’s sombre Wolfroy Goes to Town excepted) merely reinforced the impression that here was an artist who had fatally lost his way.

This impression was not in any way dispelled by July’s concert, in which a large and appreciative Arena audience saw Oldham deliver a set that drew heavily on those recent records and was, as a result, distinctly underwhelming. With the rickety Appalachian sound pushed to the forefront, Oldham’s blend of country and folk was relaxed to the point of nonchalance. As song after song drifted past on a bed of twangy guitar, pleasantly shuffling rhythms and frankly unnecessary saxophone, it was hard to avoid the conclusion that this stuff was being dispatched in an unforgivably casual manner. Nowhere was the problem more evident than in the treatment of “I See A Darkness” itself, which was entirely drained of its sepulchral elegance and reinvented as a dire, bouncy singalong.

Oldham remains a gifted lyricist, uniquely able to evoke love, loss and doubt in words of haunting and skeletal beauty. His voice, meanwhile, has a reedy, quavering quality that I find very appealing. But he has a weirdly declamatory way of singing that undermines the broken dignity of his texts and makes them sound like so much bluster. When you add the inadvisably middle-of-the-road arrangements, the outcome was a gig as baffling as it was frustrating.

To the WUK last night to see Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy. Mr Oldham had a few things to contend with, principally the searing heat (even in the late evening) and the Spain-Italy match being televised outside. But he and his polished band took it all in their stride. Perhaps too much so, for this was a gig annoyingly light on the blinding inspiration that made the early Palace records, and Oldham’s debut under the BPB name I See A Darkness, so utterly essential.

The country-ish twang that has been a part of Oldham’s musical vocabulary for years has gradually made its way to the forefront of his sound. His current sound is defined at least as much by Ruby Kash’s violin and her feathery vocal harmonies as it is by Oldham’s distinctively quavery voice. Equally prominent in the mix is the slinky percussion of Michael Zerang (also to be seen in a somewhat different environment as one of Peter Brötzmann’s Chicago Tentet). As a result, the songs shuffle amiably by without evoking much of the sense of darkness referred to in the title of Oldham’s 1999 masterpiece, or the death’s head skull on its cover. Moments of drama and clarity abound, but all too often the songs just stop, as if they can’t be bothered to lift themselves to new heights.

Oldham is a watchable but rather awkward performer. Looking like an old-time American preacher with his impressively bushy beard, he throws striking poses with his guitar and sings directly to the audience with oratorical zeal. Between songs, however, he becomes humourless and taciturn. The most he ever says to the audience is when he introduces Zerang, saying something like “the most reliable friend is synthetic” and guffawing loudly to himself at this baffling statement. The moment contributes to an impression of distance and diffidence that the music, for all its fine and arresting qualities, is fatally unable to dispel.