Sam Beam & Jesca Hoop @ RNCM, 31 Aug

Sam Beam and Jesca Hoop take to the stage of the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester as if burnished with gold. It might be a subtle effect achieved by lighting but it's an impression that lasts throughout their 90-minute set.

Ostensibly they're touring their collaborative album, Love Letter for Fire, but along the way there's time for side-steps that knot the back catalogue of Beam’s Iron & Wine material with Hoop’s solo career. The lusher instrumentation that adorns the album is absent (it’s just the voices and one guitar, or sometimes two, that we hear) but it matters not a jot. Some songs, like Midas Tongue or Kiss Me Quick, sound more Iron & Wine; others, such as The Lamb You Lost or Chalk it Up to Chi, sound more typical of Hoop’s solo work, but it is when the two of them achieve something particular to the pairing that the evening truly soars.

There are times – the climax of Know the Wild that Wants You, the quiet repetition of the title in Bright Lights and Goodbyes, or most particularly on the bird-like trills of Every Songbird Sings – when the pairing of voices feels supernatural; its curious resonance thrums in the brain and vibrates across the lengths of your arms and your legs.

They each select songs from the other’s back catalogue to rework – so Hoop chooses Belated Promise Ring from Beam's 2009 compilation Around the Well, while he opts for the smoky, jazz-infused City Bird from 2011’s Snowglobe – as well as throwing in the odd cover version (a rendering of Islands in the Stream that seems refracted through Gotye’s Somebody I Used to Know; a bewitching take on Eurythmics’ Love is a Stranger), but it's the warmth that Beam and Hoop bring to the pairing that the audience takes with them into the night. That and the desire for there to be more of this kind of thing please.