Sam Roberts (Phoenix Concert Theatre, April 27)

There's a moment, if 10 minutes can be accurately described as a moment, that I've come to dread at Sam Roberts' concerts. The Montrealer will be cruising along when his psychedelic side gets the better of him. Suddenly, he's bathing in blue lights and strumming an interminable guitar solo.

It normally happens at the end of Paranoia, an otherwise enjoyable tune from 2003's We Were Born in a Flame - and at Pop Montreal last October, it was enough to send two of my friends to the exits.

My first thought, then, was that someone needed to stage an intervention. Nothing complicated; just "Dude. You're a bar rocker with a knack for writing pop songs. Lay off the pot, ditch the goofy lights, and go write some three-minute radio hits."

On the evidence of last Thursday's gig at the Phoenix Concert Theatre, nobody got to him in time.

On the way in, I vowed that if another extended version of Paranoia broke out, I'd follow my friends' lead. But that song is no longer the exception. While Roberts is still happy to dot his sets with sing-along hits from earlier on - Brother Down, Don't Walk Away Eileen, Where Have All the Good People Gone - material from the new Chemical City proved his pop side has lost the battle with his psychedelic one.

Every time devotees would start to get their hands in the air for one of those old hits, the singer would bring them back down again - with mellow opener Mystified, Heavy, The Bootleg Saint or the chorus-absent With a Bullet. Even recent single The Gate's main effect on audiences is to disorient them. And then there was Mind Flood, which closed the main set and offered Roberts a chance for even more psychedelic wankery than Paranoia.

As you may have inferred, I'm not much a fan of this new direction. Nor, presumably, are others who fondly recall the days when Roberts was just an unpretentious Canrocker cheerily swigging from a wine bottle. But that doesn't mean I don't admire him for it.

We expect our musicians to keep doing what attracted us in the first place; as every defensive rock star undergoing a genre change is quick to point out, audiences booed Dylan when he went electric. But for Roberts, the consequences of maintaining the status quo could have been dire.

It was only three years ago that he was gracing the cover of Toro magazine's premiere issue, which proclaimed him "the future of rock." Then, just as We Were Born in a Flame failed to cure lepers, Canada's indie scene exploded. Suddenly, it wasn't Roberts who was our Great White Hope - it was Broken Social Scene and Arcade Fire. And just like that, the cool kids abandoned him.

What remained was a future not as the saviour of rock, but as the new Tragically Hip - cranking out radio-friendly hits that name-checked Canadian cities and icons, playing to fans in hockey jerseys, hitting the road each summer and gradually establishing himself as a national institution nobody outside of Canada had ever heard of.

It would have been comfortable and lucrative. But to his credit, Roberts obviously wanted no part of it. So rather than record a quick follow-up, he went off and travelled the world. And working at his own pace, he indulged his own impulses - making the psychedelic music that he'd probably always wanted to make, but wouldn't have been able to carve out a living with before.

Of course, the faithful aren't going to let him get away that easily. Merely on the strength of those early tracks, and his willingness to keep playing them, Roberts may become the Hip in spite of himself. But if enough people walk out on Paranoia, he'll finally be left with the audience he's really aiming for.