Siobhan Wilson @ Eagle Inn, Salford, 12 Jul

Looking at the crowd at the Eagle Inn tonight, two days before Glasgow-based singer-songwriter Siobhan Wilson’s debut record There Are No Saints comes out, it seems she has already generated a bit of a buzz. With its brick fireplaces and windowless darkness, Salford’s most secluded venue feels like a place heavy with the weight of history, and Wilson shows her enormous potential to live up to it in this impressive showcase of all but one song from the album.

At first the evening seems like it’s going to be a cultured affair as Wilson silently steps up to sing ...Saints’ title track: the album’s choral piano opener, embellished here by a friend providing post-rock guitar. Wilson’s performance is surprisingly physical, her classical training in Paris clear in how she confidently projects her pitch-perfect voice and allows us to inhabit the silence between notes.

Outing herself as a ‘sparkly goth’ in her black sequined top, Wilson proves to be both awe-inspiring and effortlessly approachable as she switches between her keyboard and guitar, rumbling through recent radio track Whatever Helps. When she moves onto Dear God’s folk picking, the reverence in the room is palpable. Wilson laughs that she likes to sound as if she’s playing in a church, and for a moment the Eagle Inn feels like one.

After running through Saints’ haunting French-language cuts and kicking off her shoes, Wilson emphatically proves her shape-shifting ability, adding some improvisational play to a frankly jaw-dropping Make You Mine before she returns to the keyboard for a heart-breaking performance of ...Saints’ centrepiece Disaster and Grace. As Wilson’s voice soars towards the song’s climax and the keys trail off, nowhere else in the world matters. After this masterful performance, we’d be very surprised if Wilson doesn’t grace far larger audiences very soon.