There’s a wonderful few minutes when the chatter from behind – from the bar-side attendees here solely to over-vocally sing the praises of tonight’s lead support act Elle Milano – fades entirely, every sense in the system surrounded by what’s unfolding a few feet ahead. Victory At Sea, Bostonians far from home on a cool Brixton evening, are capable of producing music to melt any heart, any soul; music to have the brain shutting down its no-longer-needed receptors, every spark of organic electricity within the skull focused on priming what’s needed to absorb the wonderfully melancholy indie-rock coming its way. At their best, the trio have the listener forgetting to draw comparisons with similar acts; when they drift into waters less unique, the band can still be spoken of in the same hushed tones of appreciation and commendation as the Black Heart Procession and Shipping News.

Where the band most obviously differs from their aforementioned peers is with regard to their vocalist – Mona Elliott, as her name must surely imply, is a woman. She possesses a pair of lungs that, once full to their capacity, must be capable of turning most decent-sized venues into a vacuum. As she exhales, her words are forged in fires divine; every syllable is laced with the most luxurious poison, each between-line breath conveys emotions few bands can express with the largest thesaurus to hand. The excellently fluid piano work from Mel Laderman only enhances the feeling of immersion further – this is the closest one can come to falling forward into a crystal-clear mountain pool, one formed entirely of spurned lovers’ tears, without drifting into dream realms born of drunken slumber.

‘No Reason To Stay’ is a fine opener, setting the tone perfectly: “My baby’s gone and died,” mourns our Mona, “Lost my heart in a bottle of wine.” For a half-hour, she rules the stage masterfully, not once letting the sometimes rude, always irritating background noise steal her spotlight; complete strangers – those without one of Victory At Sea’s five albums to date in their collection – are visibly consumed by the performance, and this critic is left wondering why he never made an effort to see them live before tonight once the requests for an encore have gone ignored for a minute or so. Although they are now without violinist Taro Hatanaka, who performed on album-before-this-one Memories Fade (this one being All Your Things Are Gone, released on April 10), the streamlined Victory At Sea unit is taught yet tender, warmly affecting yet technically accomplished. They are a band that spends much of its time in the shadows, in the corners where few but the bravest sonic explorers dare tread. Their sadness is manifested in a way so joyous that the adjectives ‘dour’ and ‘morose’ would be misplaced if applied to their music.

No, this isn’t a band mad for sadness at all; it’s a band high on the lows of life, and one truly worth celebrating. Now, to tell those barflies the very same…