The Weather Station @ The Hug & Pint, 27 Aug

The Weather Station – like The Mountain Goats who they previously supported before this, their first UK headline tour – is a band that is really centred around the vision and creativity of a single person. In this case, it's Tamara Lindeman, a Canadian child actress turned adult alt-folk cult hero. The packed, steamy room at the back of The Hug & Pint provides a friendly and welcoming place for her first Glasgow show since Celtic Connections earlier this year.

The buoyant Kept It All to Myself shows her non-folk side which is more evident on her recent, self-titled third album. The brooding sweep of Impossible is next, following the theme of a new, angular thrust to her ever-present plaintive, folky bedrock. What is extraordinary about The Weather Station is unquestionably Lindeman’s voice: cool, crystal clear and reedy. She has a way of shaping conversational, albeit beautiful, lyrics into a unique kind of transcendence. Rarely does she perform any vocal acrobatics, but there’s something mesmerising about the performance throughout.

This is accentuated when she leaves the microphone stand and sits low down at a keyboard for Floodplain, containing the plaintive lines, 'I don’t expect your love to be like mine / I expect you to know your own mind / As I know mine.' This kind of delicate directness and romantic decency are what defines her work, keeping the audience silent in rapt attention.

After most of her songs take an admittedly sombre tone, the band change tack opting to perform a cover of Dion's Now offering a more celebratory mood. As Lindeman leaves her guitar behind and dances free with the microphone, the breadth not only of her musical ability, but also capacity as a performer becomes clear: she could be playing in a bar, or on the main stage of a festival and this would fit.

Way It Is, Way It Could Be, The Weather Station's most perfect song follows, with a newly syncopated punch which slightly lessens its effect before Thirty finishes off the set, a sprawling web of confused lyrics about relationships transitioning into their serious phase, and being scared. 'It was strange, how I could feel so sane, so plane' run the lyrics. The sheer strangeness of comfort sums up both The Weather Station’s lyrics, and also their live performance.