WHY? @ Stereo, 18 March

“We’re from here,” chuckles Yoni Wolf as he climbs up on the pulpit of Stereo’s dank basement. The WHY? frontman belies his shy, nerdy recording persona with a conveyor belt of risqué puns and a more confident stage command than those familiar with the part Doom/part Dylan maverick might presume of him.

Equally celebratory and melancholic, the opening salvoes of These Few Presidents and Rubber Traits sound huge with the instalment of Fog’s Andrew Broder and Mark Erickson to the trio. Free of instruments – beyond the odd maraca – Wolf jabs and slices the smoke in the air with a flat fist and adroitly nods to his past as an underground MC when the verses to A Sky For Shoeing Horses Under demand the touch of a rugged flow.

A crowd-elected encore sees a few impromptu bars of Hey Jude shoehorned in between Elephant Eyelash’s dizzying opener Crushed Bones and a speed-rapped rendition of 21st Century Pop Song that leaves everybody in a packed house breathless with wide smiles. “Are there any Belle and Sebastian fans here tonight?” Wolf asks. ”We've a side-project called Bell-head and Sebastian, a covers band done in a dickish manner.” I guess you’d need to have been there. [Johnny Langlands]