Some bands arrive so fully formed it soon becomes apparent they have nowhere else to go. Others, like futurist-folk six-piece Tunng, never seem to stop evolving. Over a decade characterised by constant sonic murmuration, they've released five quietly persuasive albums (most recently, the excellent Turbines), reshuffled key personnel and accumulated a discerning, if hardly Coldplay-sized, fanbase.
Their fragmentary tales of hope and/or dread certainly spring from a very English folk tradition, albeit one garlanded with skittering beats and triggered samples that still manage to sound a little time-slipped, more Radiophonic Workshop than David Guetta. The half-whispered vocal interplay also occasionally recalls Mercury winners the xx, if they were more into the Wicker Man than urban alienation.
In a confined Glasgow basement, it casts quite a spell. Over the fragile guitar arpeggios of Once, the entire band chorus-lines about sinning and singing before their lifetime is over, while on Tale from Black, one of Tunng's earliest songs, singer/guitarist Mike Lindsay describes a killer washing young blood from her hands in an unsettling, nursery-rhyme spiral that also employs snippets of Connie Francis's Who's Sorry Now? to extremely creepy effect. The Morricone-esque By Dusk They Were in the City initially seems just as ominous, but the melodica-led instrumental takes an unexpected left turn, climaxing with the sort of blazing electric guitar solo you might expect from the Darkness rather than Fairport Convention. It's a rare bit of self-aware rock theatre that helps the room unclench.
Tunng's pastoral gothic may remain an acquired taste, but there is a special pleasure in seeing a band exploring new byways at their own pace, applying their talents to refinement rather than reinvention. They finish with Bullets, a melodious oom-pah track that invites a communal nah-nah-nah singalong. It may not have been their elusive breakout hit, but it is perhaps the best song of recent years to employ the word "gelignite".
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