Dirty Three @ Summerhall, 5 July

We’re barely halfway through the second song, and Warren Ellis has already climbed the venue’s speaker stack to scream into the Edinburgh night. Still, it’s only to be expected from one of alternative rock’s most endearingly energetic eccentrics, and the crowd roars its approval as Dirty Three’s de facto frontman abandons his trusty violin in a flurry of looped, overlapping cacophony to begin his precarious climb.

The evening started so sweetly as well. Local favourites eagleowl talk up their D3 adulation, and the violin/double bass arrangements that festoon their slow-paced sadcore certainly pull from a similarly mournful strand of desolate Americana. It’s the close harmonies of Bartholomew Owl and Clarissa Cheong that set them apart though – you'll spot shades of Low and Smog in their soft-shifting melodies but the beauty of songs like Not Over tug at the tearducts deftly and moreishly, easily deserving of their own form of wide-eyed, cultish devotion.

So that’s the calm; now, what about the storm? There’s something intensely elemental about the sounds sculpted by Dirty Three, from Mick Turner’s gently droning chords to the fiercely idiosyncratic drumming of Jim White. They conjure violent seas and roaring winds as vividly as serene, pastoral landscapes, and their natural knack for articulating the confusion of despair finds the perfect vehicle in their sense of composition – never directly melodic but always subtly yet powerfully suggestive of melody. 

Even at its most accessible (ever the hilarious raconteur, offering light relief from the emotional heft of D3’s musical onslaught, Ellis smilingly introduces Everything is Fucked and Hope as their “attempts to write a hit single”), there are still moments when the music stutters, as if affected by a sudden change in the air. White in particular creates rhythms within rhythms; a tumbling, rolling tour de force that’s both pure distillation of and entirely antithetical to standard understandings of ‘rock music.’

All the while, they fashion beautiful chaos with one foot in the inherent sadness of bluegrass, the other in something stranger and more poignant. As Ellis bounds across the stage, half-conducting, half lost to the rush, it’s impossible not to surrender to their many charms.