Shield Patterns @ Eagle Inn, Salford, 25 April

With their 2014 debut album Contour Lines, Richard Knox and Claire Brentnall aka Shield Patterns executed a near faultless reworking of vogue-ish electronica, moulding the everyday norm (industrial beats vs choral melodics) into something wholly distinct. They inched towards desolation, but sonic savvy – an eye for both light and shade – pitched them a league ahead of regular gloom-pop tropes. 

For the home date of a lengthy European and UK tour, they set a full house (chatter-free – top marks) a mighty challenge, opening with a near-formless new and untitled opener before setting about the clang and babble of album closer Charon. From that turbulent opening, they sequence their set into a dizzying ebb and flow. Knox adds live percussion and oversees beats that shake the room; he holds the drone coda of Monument until it's ready to break before Brentnall ghosts into a tender, solo reading of Age of Ice. Album mainstays Dust Hung Heavy and Ruby Red swell and bloom. There's a fragile but devastating encore of WeYouMe, the pair seemingly taken aback by calls to return.

Increasingly, the key to Shield Patterns' abstruse narratives lies in how Brentnall connects her emotional landscape to the physical. From the breathless longing of Monument ("Break my body in two, it's incomplete without you") to the gothic horror of Carve the Dirt ("Grind my teeth into spines… 'til we're safe in the ground together"), her poetics are primal, her eye unwavering. The Shield Patterns canon emerges as no more or no less than the love song re-imagined, impelled by an unromanticised candour that posits the whole ridiculous folly as either lifeblood or the abyss. If that chimes with you – and it really should – open your heart in this direction.