The Handsome Family @ Trades Club, Hebden Bridge, 8 Mar

Plenty of bands younger and fresher than The Handsome Family would have baulked at the idea of flying to the UK to kick off an extensive tour in the present climate. Not so for the road-hardened Brett and Rennie Sparks. They’ve been doing this too long to let one of the country’s most severe cold snaps in years stop them from touching down last week to undertake a jaunt that takes in everywhere from Stirling to Southampton and that marks the latest chapter in a low-key love story between the band and these islands, despite the many thousands of miles that they find themselves from their native Albuquerque, New Mexico.

After a couple of decades of ploughing the same eccentric alt-country furrow, The Handsome Family’s fortunes took a dramatic upswing four years ago when their track Far from Any Road wasn’t just handpicked to be the theme tune to the first season of True Detective; despite it predating the series by fifteen years, it genuinely sounded so eerily atmospheric that it was as if it had been written for the occasion. Since, they’ve admirably stuck to their guns, with 2016’s Unseen a dark, weird journey into America’s natural world.

Front and centre tonight, though, is Through the Trees, which is celebrating its twentieth anniversary; Mr and Mrs Sparks reel it off in full, backed ably by Jason Toth on drums and Alex McMahon on whichever instrument that particular song might call for. They’ve worked at such a prodigious rate over the course of their career that it feels almost churlish to pinpoint one album as their definitive, but you’d have to think, especially on tonight’s evidence at the never-more-homely Trades Club in Hebden Bridge, that Through the Trees would be a serious contender in that regard.

Every one of the band’s faces is on display here, from the weird tension of My Sister’s Tiny Hands to the ominous roll of The Giant of Illinois. Top of the pile, of course, is the group’s desperately sad treatise on addiction, Weightless Again. Few of these songs speak to Brett having been a particularly chirpy frame of mind at the time of writing – he’d not long since suffered a nervous breakdown – but there’s a lightness of touch lent to proceedings, as always, by the delightful stage banter tonight, with deadpan Brett proving the perfect foil for Rennie’s colourful tales of the tour so far.

With a smattering of fan favourites rounding out the evening – the gorgeous So Much Wine among them – this is an exercise in vintage The Handsome Family in suitably quirky surroundings. You could set your watch by their reliably weird charm.