Midlake – Anson Rooms, Bristol 25/02/14

It’s tricky to pinpoint exactly what makes a bona fide cult act, but unassuming Texan folkies Midlake seem to fit the bill pretty well.

Right now, they’re winding down a quick schlep around the UK’s provinces before a headline show at London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire and a slot at Manchester’s inaugural BBC 6 Music festival at the end of the month. A notice displayed at their merchandise stand – “Meet Midlake Here After The Show!” – enhances their down-to-earth, for-the-people appeal.

Having scored an indie sleeper hit with 2006’s woozy, sepia-tinged The Trials of Van Occupanther LP – and it’s material from that album like “Young Bride” and “Roscoe” that gets the best reaction this evening – 2010’s The Courage of Others was more coolly received. The Texan six piece then found themselves at something of a crossroads following the departure of singer Tim Smith, with guitarist/backing vocalist Eric Pulido assuming the frontman’s duties on last year’s Antiphon album, the band’s fourth.

Aside from the personnel shift, this latest record doesn’t mess much with their proven, bewitching soft-rock formula. Antiphon was mixed by the Grammy-winning Tony Hoffer, the man responsible for applying a glossy studio veneer to big sellers by Beck, Phoenix and Air, but Midlake’s 70s British first-wave prog influences could hardly be called fashionable (sample YouTube user comment on the band’s recent work: “It’s like Camel and Alan Parsons had a baby and raised it on a steady diet of Rod Evans era Deep Purple…”) After all, they even have a flautist.

The audience in the Anson Rooms tonight are predominantly male, middle-aged and often quite hairy – indeed, there’s a gent to our left who quite closely resembles Saruman the White. If there is a slight Tolkien-esque quality to some of Midlake’s lyrical content, as in the murky “Provider” (“Onward forth into a land unknown / Swords were drawn upon the road…”) The band conjure an atmosphere of olde-worlde strangeness on record; on stage, shrouded in darkness for much of the set, they don’t fill the role of willing rock stars.

Rake-thin guitarist Joey McClellan, a dead ringer for Adam Sackler from Girls, throws the most convincing poses, but Pulido is something of a reticent focal point. He resists introducing himself or any of the group until midway through the set, and he seems charmingly confused by the audience’s appreciative wolf-whistles (“Are those….cat calls…or just supportive noises?!”) They may not be the most visually compelling live experience around, but it’s easy to lose yourself in Midlake’s spectral world.