Warpaint @ Liverpool Music Week, 27 Oct

Having made use of the ornate Grand Central Dome at last year’s celebrations to bring Sheffield crooner Richard Hawley to the city, Liverpool Music Week delight again, this time delivering Californian quartet Warpaint to the Mersey shores for the ceremonious opening night of this year’s ten-day-long, city-wide festival.

In the suitably atmospheric setting of the former Methodist church, Warpaint deliver a faultless set spanning three albums' worth of ghoulish, dreamy alt rock, laced with shimmers of danceable moments. Imbued with the kind of mesmerising, intricate guitar sounds and hazy vocals that wash over and bathe you, sometimes the audience lose a little focus, with chatter audible during some of the quieter moments of the set.

However, the crowd sways to attention and the hairs stand on the back of your neck, as the spine-tingling vocals on Undertow have the audience firmly caught in a hypnosis of harmonies and soothing guitars. The same response greets Love is to Die, while latest single, the aptly-titled New Song, ups the tempo a little, delivering some directional sass and getting the room shuffling along to its disco shoegaze.

The improvisation their live performances are lauded for is showcased towards the end of the set when guitarists Emily Kokal and Theresa Wayman gather around Stella Mozgawa’s drum kit with a couple of sticks, responding to each other’s rhythms while bassist Jenny Lee Lindberg plucks on, building up to a cacophonous crescendo that, like their more recognisable tracks, has the room hooked on every scattered note. It’s a powerful moment and reminds us of the strength of the group’s musicianship: Warpaint probably have the best rhythm section in the business at the moment and harmonies that are no less than celestial to match.