Consisting of Wooden Shjips’ guitarist/ vocalist Erik “Ripley” Johnson and fellow San Franciscan Sanae Yamada on keyboards, Moon Duo returned to Brighton to promote third album, Circles.

While it would be easy to get hung up on their influences (Suicide, Can, Royal Trux, even The Kills at points), that would totally miss the effect of everything combined, with the pair backed by a metronomic drummer and motoric projections.

The effect made the gig skull-crushing, each unintroduced song starting with a colossal riff from Johnson’s Airline guitar, repeated and stretched behind waves of Yamada’s two analogue synths.

The pair channelled said riffs for five to ten minutes each time, with the end result that the audience swayed and threw off any inhibitions with glee.

The feedback, looping and delay never once veered to the self-indulgent, with every track a slight variation on the previous and the guitar work restrained and measured throughout.

Each song took on its own colour from an astonishingly broad template, the pair’s submerged vocals swimming on top.

Whatever you may have read about Moon Duo fails to convey what they achieve live, which tonight, essentially, was rock and roll in the purest sense.