Daughn Gibson @ East Village Arts Club, Liverpool, 24 November

“Tonight seems like a good night for us to just fuck around; that’s alright with you guys, right?” asks Daughn Gibson with the rhetorical artifice of a malevolent bar brawler with an axe to grind. “OK, you asked for it.” When the possessor of Sub Pop’s most blood-curdling baritone demands compliance with his right to fuck around, it’s most wise to appear amenable.

The persona of brutish Lynchian storyteller Daughn Gibson is taken on by Pennsylvanian native Josh Martin, a former truck driver who has the physique of a rabid cage-fighter and a face chiselled from granite found on the roadside. Tonight he affects a snake-hipped Nick Cave at his most mercurial, fronting a leftfield Burial side-project haunted by the ghost of Johnny Cash. It’s a fuck-awful formula of ill-fitting ideologies spliced together heavy-handedly, which would usually indicate it’s just plainly fuck-awful. But in the context of East Village Arts Club – and of his two albums, 2012’s All Hell and 2013’s Me Moan – the misanthropic Americana, deranged Moog stabs and found sounds are a triumph of the classic and the creepy, the maudlin and the modern.

Mawkish opener In the Beginning sets a reverent tone, but it’s single Phantom Rider that rears its head furthest from the darkness as a standalone highlight: woozy freak-pop as heard through Daughn’s drunkard bellowing and chewed up syllables. Daughn’s approach to songwriting is one of humanism; he's less of a banger-monger, more of a campfire crooner with a penchant for the sinister. Why, for Kissin on the Blacktop he almost seems bleary-eyed; though he definitely isn't, of course – he has way too much chest hair for any sentimental codswallop.

He vindictively picks out crowd members to engage them in one-on-one staring contests during final song A Young Girl’s World, affecting the hyper-masculinity of a spandex-clad WWE Superstar; fear for dinner, pelvic thrusts for breakfast. It’s a cocaine-fuelled Elvis Presley, not an MCAT-addled James Blake. Now bow down to your patriarchal master.