Chocolate,With Added Flavorings

“What do you call divine?” Chocolate Genius sang halfway though his rambling, exasperating and intermittently moving performance at Largo on Thursday. The singer, whose real name is Marc Anthony Thompson, seeks divinity wherever he can find it--in sex, in friendship, in classic rock songs that link carnality to transcendence.

His last two albums, which are titled “Black Music” and “Godmusic,” can be heard as one long discourse on his spiritual yearnings and the impossibility of faith; his barbed eccentricity slicing through piety like a razor blade. There is simply no one quite like him in rock at the moment.

Thompson is a singer-songwriter, but not of the confessional variety. His material exists outside the parameters of contemporary pop--it’s meditative folk-rock that’s rigidly arranged but flows smoothly. At Largo, he sang introspective songs about the failures of organized religion and consumerism, and the search for meaning in a soulless universe.

Working with a sympathetic quartet, Thompson, who occasionally strummed a guitar, sang in an uninflected middle register, flavoring his songs with countless bits of lyrics from other artists’ songs. That waywardness became a distraction, as Thompson constantly interrupted himself, took long breaks between songs to banter and waited for guitars to be tuned. By drawing attention away from his compelling material, Thompson became his own worst enemy.