Live Review: All Our Exes Live In Texas, Fanny Lumsden & The Thrillseekers, Miss Eileen & King Leer

Sometimes it's easy to forget the true communal importance of music within a culture. It's far too easy to simply think of it as a luxury, instead of an essential component of societal growth and reflection. As highfalutin or hyperbolic as it may sound, tonight's proceedings were a truly heartwarming and genuine reminder of everything music can be and bring to a people.

Miss Eileen & King Lear were a wonderful opener. The sibling duo combined warm, humorous asides with beautiful songwriting as effortlessly memorable as it was professionally delivered. The pair's performance has the feel of something endlessly road-tested, that nevertheless continues to excite and delight the two musicians. The duo easily swapped lead vocal duties, teamed up for harmonies and bounced quick-witted banter off each other without missing a step.

Fanny Lumsden & The Thrillseekers, while arguably the weakest performers of the night, nevertheless delivered a exceptional performance. The band were enriching and offsetting Lumsden's knack for detail-driven songwriting with clever, eclectic arrangements. Surprisingly, Lumsden and band perform best when they eschew their tendency for faster material and jammy performances and deliver slower, more spacious material. There's something otherworldly about their more sedate numbers that is both exceptionally intriguing and affecting.

The headline performance, however, was something truly remarkable - and what truly bore out the central hypothesis of the evening's proceedings. Unless you saw it for yourself, you'd have difficulty believing just how many different feelings and experiences were bundled up in the performance of All Our Exes Live In Texas. This is a group who openly admit they specialise in chronicling heartache that, in between songs of almost overwhelming beauty and faultless technique, are so gutbustingly hilarious that laughter risks becoming physically painful.

It's genuinely difficult to sum up the experience. In one instant, it's being caught up in the four-part vocal harmonies and crushingly honest lyrics of a song like Sailboat. In another, it's listening to Elana Stone and Katie Wighton ruminate on stabbing one another for publicity while Georgia Mooney struggles to contain her disgust. It's feeling delight and connection with an entire venue of people - and struggling with some of the most beautiful and sad music you've ever heard. It's joy, pain and humour. Solitude, connection, stupidity and genius.

Seriously, it'll make you believe again. Don't ever miss this band.