Big Thief @ La Belle Angele, Edinburgh, 2 Apr

The crowd at La Belle Angele, packed like sardines, is feverish in anticipation for Big Thief. The noise and chatter floats and reverberates around the room, rising once more as the band take the stage. But, before playing a note, the three-piece (minus Buck Meek tonight) gaze out over the audience as though searching for something and everyone falls silent, expectant. Such is the spellbinding nature of this type of buzz band, one that trades in hushed confessional tones and is able to render the personal political, the micro macro, and vice versa.

The opening few songs are coy and unassuming, eliciting a keen, but unremarkable response. However, when the dissonant noise that kicks off Shark Smile appears it lights the fuse that pushes the performance to the next level. That song, along with Masterpiece and Mythological Beauty that follow, demonstrate some of the best hooks the band has to offer, before new songs The Toy and Terminal Paradise wring out the raw emotion that has started to bubble up inside of Adrianne Lenker in the form of a seemingly improvised solo and some anguished screams. The poignant, poetic imagery of Mary ends the main set before the band take a short, well-deserved break, but there's little respite as the encore begins with Pretty Things, an attempt to disassemble perceived notions of femininity and masculinity through religious and sexual metaphors.

Lenker begins the show with a lot of chat, expressing gratitude and making jokes, but as the intensity rises all of her energy is directed into the music. By the time we reach the closer, Orange, there's a melancholic energy that is only natural given the difficult and complex subject matter of many Big Thief songs. At the beginning of the encore she starts to explain a feeling of “being in a loop”, but didn't quite finish the thought, preferring to let the songs do the talking, allowing the baying, adoring audience to fill in the emotional gaps.