Jesca Hoop @ The Caves, Edinburgh, 12 May

Jesca Hoop’s moving songs wrestle with romantic friction, loss and personal identity, but on stage she’s never afraid to crack a joke – “here’s another zesty little number” she says before launching into a heartbroken ballad.

The singer-songwriter is in Edinburgh in support of her excellent new album Long Wave Home and this time is accompanied onstage by drummer and guitarist Rachel Rimmer and bassist, keyboardist and This Is The Kit member Rozi Plain. Over six solo albums and innumerable EPs, acoustic reinventions and collaborations with the likes of Iron & Wine’s Sam Beam, Hoop has built up an impressive songbook.

She may have moved from the US to Manchester more than twenty years ago but her California twang is still intact. Still, there’s little of the brashness you might associate with the Golden State. This show inside the swelteringly hot Caves is her first non-solo show in years, and there’s the sense that she's still feeling her way back inside these songs with a few hiccups to iron out. “You’re my kink catchers,” Hoop exclaims at one point as her hands ghost over the guitar sounding out riffs and chords. Before that though, Rimmer plays a short solo set under her hot springs guise, with her penultimate song featuring some extremely impressive whistling over minimal looped guitar.

As the main event kicks off, Hoop digs into her array of guitars for opener Adam and Designer Citizen, the latter's birdsong melody bringing to mind Joanna Newsom. Taken from her latest album, she later claims it was finished at her tour booking agent’s request. I Was Just 14 is introduced with an explanation of her Mormon upbringing and a passionate “fuck church” before Hoop rolls into the song’s tale of judging a teen girl who arrived at church cradling a pregnant belly and how it caused her to reflect on her own upbringing.

Even when the subject matter isn't so bracingly raw, she's an engaging storyteller: “I rode in here on a white horse,” she drawls by way of explanation for her white stage outfit. The real crowd pleasers come from 2017’s Memories Are Now, like the bitter anti-consumerist invective of Simon Says and the gorgeous and sinuous guitar lines of Pegasi.

Even in a full band format many of these tracks are pretty stripped down; little more than three voices and gently picked, strummed or brushed instrumentation. If anything this makes the grander moments stand out all the more, with the gothic STONECHILD – named for a phenomenon whereby a dead fetus too large to be reabsorbed develops a stone-like calcified shell to protect its host from infection – particularly benefiting from arriving late in the set, once the trio have found their groove and allowed the scale of their arrangements to unfurl. It’s definitely a little bit of a work in progress but it’s an excellent showcase for a talented songwriter whose eye for memorable imagery remains undimmed.