Japanese Breakfast @ The Mash House, Edinburgh, 4 Oct

All is dark as Michelle Zauner and her Japanese Breakfast cohort take to their instruments, a few white lights shining out like headlamps in the cold night outside. They break straight into the languid, reverb-packed Diving Woman, the opener to this year's excellent Soft Sounds from Another Planet album. The stage is set for an extended, conceptual take on that album's science fiction-inflected jangle pop – except we actually get something even better.

Three songs in and Zauner has ditched the dark jumper and is dancing around in full popstar mode, and before long we're deep within a world of expertly crafted but pleasantly unpolished tunes from both Soft Sounds and 2016's Psychopomp. We flip back and forth between the two, with the cathartic lyrics, lightly strained vocals and atmospheric guitar work just as charming and engrossing as it is on both records. What you don't get on record, however, is Zauner singing the praises of the farmyard in the gaps between tracks. 

Maybe it's the sold-out nature of much of this UK tour, coupled with her stated continual fear that no-one will show up to her shows, but once Zauner gets going her enthusiasm is endless. She shouts out her favourite UK service station (Tebay, obviously); she fills us in on the band's coping strategies in the tour van (maths, ASMR videos and farming RPG Stardew Valley); she names the animal she'd like to become in the event of her reincarnation ("a sheep, wandering around the Highlands"). 

She gleefully describes Edinburgh as "FUCKING BEAUTIFUL", and complements the crowd on their impressive level of spectacle ownership. A brilliant one-two punch of Everybody Wants to Love You and synth-pop robot love story Machinist brings us out at the other end of the tunnel, after a journey that balances light and darkness to impressive effect, with a lo-fi star at the wheel.