Much like the city’s subway Parquet Courts have circled back to Glasgow to kick off their European tour for new album Sunbathing Animals, having played the last date of their previous tour there on Hallowe’en 2013.

Playing for an hour straight, with no encore, the newer songs are predictably a little less well known by the crowd, which spends the first half of the show largely static but by the time we’re graced by fiery renditions of the likes of ‘Light Up Gold’ there’s a serious amount of pogoing and general pit mayhem at the front of the stage. Oddly, despite having paid good money to get in and probably shelling out the eye watering £4.50 for a pint, one crowd member feels the need to heckle bassist Sean Yeaton at one point by telling him to shut up in no uncertain terms. By the end of that encounter though it’s band & 99% of fans 1, dickhead nil.

Parquet Courts suffer a bit from less than clear final vocals for the bulk of their set but musically there are no flaws in 60 minutes packed with the maximum amount of songs and the bare minimum of chat, other than that mention of the circular nature of their kicking things off here, a mention of the summer solstice and a possible dig at the timing of the show by way of mentioning that it’ll still be daylight at the end of it, something that anyone travelling from outside Glasgow by public transport could be quite happy for, given the venue’s distance from the city centre. They were great tonight and no doubt will only improve on that as the tour progresses.

Tonight’s only support act were newcomers Ultimate Painting, playing their first ever show. Not that you’d have known without being told as they’re a tight unit that has clearly spent a lot of time playing together and working on their songs, one of which may have been called ‘Freak Beard’ (that muddy vocal issue struck them too). With a sound taking in elements of The Velvet Underground, The Byrds and Ride theirs was a good performance, let down only by the fact that some of their songs are a tad on the plodding side. Their livelier numbers are though cracking songs and exhibit enough variety that by rights should see them go from strength to strength through the coming months and bring them to the stage as headliners in the not too distant future, should their schedules for Veronica Falls & Mazes allow.

Tom Vek’s Luck is stuffed full of so much sonic experimentation it pops and crackles - from the unearthly backing chorus of Vek in the background to the angular riffs that form the backbone of his songs. This strangeness is difficult to transfer into a live context though, and tonight at XOYO, he falls a bit… flat. With the bursts of rising keyboard-noise precluding Tom Wolfe-homage, ‘Sherman (Animals in the Jungle)’ single, one could be forgiven for thinking that what follows would be more interesting than a bass and guitar riff.

That’s not to say live Tom Vek is boring Tom Vek. Accompanied by drummer and bassist/guitarist, Vek whips through ‘Green Lights’, ‘Chore’ and ‘C-C’ with the kind of swagger that one would expect from a man who recorded We Have Sound at 22, the best part of a decade a go. There are riff-dischords, drawling vocal repetition, and a technical confidence that is quite a thing. Vek also creates musical motifs rather than song structures, which can often result in the pleasing effect of completely upending his songs. Verses have repeated phrases rattling around, and choruses are at times perversely wordless - a riff or a harmonized ‘woah’ filling the space. At times his material feels like one long series of bridges, codas in between climaxes that lie tantalisingly out of reach.

Tom Vek himself is an interesting creature. Born in Hounslow, he’s a multi-instrumentalist who got picked up by Island after recording his debut in his parents’ garage, a graphic design student who designs his own website and album covers, a guy who recently developed an app to help you see album artwork on your phone, before, quite bizarrely, channeling his efforts into setting up his own shortened URL (vek.to, if you’re interested). After spending his formative years being the ‘underrated’ Tom Vek that people talked about in hushed whispers in bars in Dalston, Vek is now recording in a nice, big studio and enjoying near-universal acclaim.

Whilst material from Luck retains the intelligence and humour that made his first two albums so exciting, many of Vek’s new ideas feel half-formed, and at time even grating. ‘The Girl You Wouldn’t Leave’ is an exercise in annoying your audience - one excruciating line repeated ad nauseum. As well as the fact one would probably suggest leaving it off the live setlist, it really doesn’t take four minutes to make your point, Tom.

That aside, there are still enough classics on the list to keep his audience bouncing. Strange guitar codas that leave you bemused and breathless, the combination of machine and live drum beats that leave you palpitating - it’s easy to remember why those hushed whispers began. As Vek pushes his glasses back on his nose, pauses for breath and then starts jumping up and down to ‘Aroused’ you remember that this man has more powder in his casket than ‘Sherman’ might give him credit for. Let’s hope settling into his thirties doesn’t mean settling.

The buzz surrounding this one-off performance by the enigmatic, famously reclusive, modern-day renaissance man, Keaton Henson, is tangible. His only other live performance of 2014 came at the Antigel Festival in Geneva back in February, so tickets for this event, part of James Lavelle's 'Meltdown' at the Southbank Centre, have quickly been snapped up.

For all the talk of Henson's crippling fear of live performance, the evidence that he appears to be conquering his stage-fright is promising. Despite creeping from the wings in near-darkness and the occasional pregnant silence as he moves between the grand piano and guitar, he introduces his songs with a softly-spoken charm and strikes up an easy rapport with his audience. Spontaneous laughter en masse isn't something we'd expected to hear that evening.

He tells the crowd how 'Lying To You' was written while killing time in a bleak Los Angeles hotel room, and that it was especially significant for him to play the Queen Elizabeth Hall as he'd once seen his hero, Randy Newman, performing there on the very same stage. Invaluable details for his ardent fans who are certainly vocal enough between songs to let Keaton know just how affecting people find his music.

Like so many expansive artists, Keaton Henson seems to enjoy collaboration, Birthdays featuring guest musicians on several tracks. His new classical album Romantic Works, from which he plays several songs, was written closely with Ren Ford, cellist from The Josella String Quartet who accompanies him for most of the show. The stage itself is designed by artists Clarke & Reilly; a floor arrangement made up from over 3,000 antique car wing mirrors framed by rustic wooden beams, reflecting light elegantly around the venue.

Altogether, this feels like a special event. The venue's perfect and the music gorgeously rendered live; delicate and sincere, hitting all the same impassioned lows (and occasional highs) you can draw from the records. The set is over within the hour but never misses a beat, including favourites and rarities from his entire back-catalogue, managing to be both intimate yet grand. Some may find him self-involved or maudlin, but that would be missing the point. If we all felt love, loss, guilt and fear as acutely as Keaton Henson, and were all able to express it as beautifully, he wouldn't be quite so special.

Sian Ahern describes her voice as “an instrument” rather than a outlet for narrative in Eaux songs, and this blurred distinction between the mechanical and the organic is at the heart of much of the output of the London-based trio. Despite being associated with a mind-boggling number of adjectives and portmanteau genres in the music press - apart from ‘electronic’ - Eaux try their hardest to not be pinned down. Indeed the only aspect the songs from their new album Plastics have in common, is a building of layers of rhythm and instrumentation one on top of the other throughout a song, and a deep, rolling crescendo, borne out of the fact that these songs were created in jams, hours of playing together crystallised into five minute songs.

A three-piece on a tiny stage in Dalston’s Birthdays, Ben Cross to the left with a guitar, Ahern in the middle on a drum machine and Stephen Warrington to the right on synths, the night begins with a heartbeat over the speakers and shimmering leopard print projected on the back wall. A gradual build of the beat over the course of each song climaxes not in a chorus, but instead in static, as machine-sounds jostle about with Sian’s vocals and fall about against each other - a beat underneath an arpeggio, an arpeggio underneath a chord, a chord underneath an echo. Ahern stands onstage, eyes closed in the light, cranking the reverb up to create a thousand ghost Sians in the background, twisting around each other.

Despite crackles and loops humming like monitors in a hospital ward, there is a level of human feeling in the songs from Plastics, not within the lyrics (which are almost like sonic texture rather than words), but within the songs themselves. Watching the crowd bob up and down, it is obvious that this is dance music - ‘Peace Makes Plenty’ is Donna Summer anti-disco, in which Ahern’s Kate Bush howl becomes a proto-house version of the seventies club scene - but at the same time as Eaux convinces their audience to move, their music also instills in its listener a sense of dread. Particularly with the ebb of Cross’s malevolent bass that forms the tide of ‘Sleeper’, one has the uncanny feeling that the notes are just the beginning, that something is approaching. Every time another part gets dropped in, a song that starts as dark techno gradually segues into baroque electronica before finally descending into noise.

Although watching Eaux working with their machines is a bit like listening to Google’s DeepMind conducting an orchestra, the lines between the biological and the organic are hazy. Although it’s digital music, Eaux don’t bother with laptops. Even Hans Lo’s audio-visuals are strikingly analogue, projecting wobbling patterns onto the back of the stage with a projector. On this day in June 2014, on which a computer has passed the Turing test and been mistaken for a human, Eaux are a reminder that whilst electronic programmes are making leaps to close the gap between a system of circuits and sentience, humans are on their way to absorbing that technology to create human music that effectively mimics the blurred line between the two.