Lo Moon @ Night & Day Café, Manchester, 19 May

This first run of UK dates have been a long time in the making, but so has everything else about Los Angeles three-piece Lo Moon. To say that they didn’t rush out their self-titled debut, which finally landed this past March, would be an understatement; they spent most of the last couple of years teasing it, releasing three towering singles – Loveless, This Is It and Thorns and playing live only sporadically. Still, there was more than enough in those tracks to inspire intrigue – not least the clear debt they owed to Talk Talk’s last two records, Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock, and quite how proudly they wore that influence on their sleeves.

Lo Moon was very much in that same vein across its ten tracks, and the major question hanging over this first jaunt around Britain is how they’ll turn out sounding in small venues when they sound so much as if they were penned with larger rooms in mind. The results are mixed; with the setting at Night & Day Café that is bordering on unbearably hot, they deliver powerful renditions of the big hitters, particularly opener This Is It, and a scintillating run during the encore, through Loveless. 

They’re fleshed-out to a four-piece on stage but still can’t quite capture the songs as relayed on record. Thorns, for instance, is missing the brass; Real Love soars, as does a stripped-back take on All In; My Money though, falls a touch flat. It’s not often you see bands restrained by the intimate nature of their live surroundings – they much more often flounder in venues too big for them. Tonight though, it feels a little as if Lo Moon are too big for the Night & Day – not the other way around.