Deafheaven @ Saint Luke's, Glasgow, 23 Apr

As trite as it is to say, St Luke’s couldn’t be a more suitable venue for the ceremonious, practically spiritual force that is Deafheaven. There’s something primally correct about experiencing the genre-stretching black metal group in a converted church, a place where people once gathered to consider the existence of something bigger than and beyond themselves. On record, Deafheaven possess a grandiosity and emotional magnitude that already inspires such lofty existential thoughts, but in the flesh that transcendental quality takes on an overwhelming physical dimension that seems to puncture a hole through the ordinary to somewhere else.

Crucial to that power is George Clarke’s disarmingly eccentric yet utterly ensorcelling presence. The singer is a performer in the truest sense of the word; his behaviour is exaggeratedly theatrical and clearly choreographed, yet in a way that feels authentic, and is deeply affecting. His chin upturned and his posture dead straight, he flicks his wrists and pinches the air with the haughty severity of an orchestra’s conductor during the instrumental stretches, baiting the crowd with a wide-eyed stare and a seductive single curled finger.

At other times Clarke’s shrieking into the faces of the front row, dangling the microphone stand perilously above their heads while dousing them with his freshly wetted fringe. Bathed in green light, eyes fixed manically on the heavens, he could well be doing semaphore to an incoming UFO during a thunderous cover of Mogwai’s Cody. Part David Byrne in Stop Making Sense, part Charlie Chaplin’s Great Dictator, Clarke is the cathartic quality of Deafheaven’s sound transposed into a magnetic, somewhat frightening human form.

The remainder of Deafheaven remain fairly stoic while conjuring seismic din that’s more than just ferociously loud (though it very much is that too). Across an outstanding opening triptych from 2015’s New Bermuda, the band carve a steadfast, elegant line from the pulverising gallop of Brought to the Water, through Baby Blue’s clean melodic peals and deadly blast beats, to Come Back’s thrashy middle section and gleaming slide guitar come down.

However, it’s during Dream House that Deafheaven achieve a state of transcendence befitting of tonight’s ecclesiastical surroundings. Just like on their breakthrough Sunbather, the tornado of shoegazy tumult suddenly subsides, leaving Kerry McCoy’s guitar lonely and exposed. For a brief moment we bathe in its quiet chimes, bearing the texture and radiance of light through stained glass, and then with a roar the heavens open.