Kid Harpoon

"We raise a toast to the health of our friend Zach Condon and to the health of everyone in this room."

And there is a good few of them. Despite the last-minute cancellation of oh-so-hot-right-now blog superstar Beirut due to ill health and personal circumstances, London has turned out en masse for co-headliners A Hawk And A Hacksaw - and I'll bet they're glad they did.

Opening with the core duo of accordionist Jeremy Barnes (formerly of Neutral Milk Hotel) and the beautiful Heather Trost on violin, the sound emanating belies the minimalist duo in front of me. The complex Middle Eastern scales are layered and played by what sounds like a Turkish orchestra; it's only upon opening my eyes again, after drifting somewhere quite special, that I'm reminded that it really is only two people playing.

You could feasibly write off a lot of their material as one-dimensional, and in some respects you'd be be right, but it's as you focus on each fragmented movement of eastern delight and the underbelly of creativity that you begin to realise the real A Hawk And A Hacksaw. From the carefully organised percussive layout, replete with a drumstick hat fashioned by Barnes, through to the way in which the band can almost impossibly reproduce their sound live and still convey the core romanticism and effortless tugging at the heartstrings that they build so well on record.

The Luminaire's reliably respectful audience is transfixed throughout, and the mood picks up even more when the remaining members of Beirut join the duo onstage for a total of two encores and a rendition of a Beirut number. An oboe adding a new dimension to AHAAH's material and a full band breathing an unmistakable life into proceedings.

As the band finishes up in the audience, and they proclaim themselves 'a band of the people', we're in no position to argue. Proof that the boring adage of music stagnating has no value, we can rely on the Leaf Label and their ilk to continue providing us with gems like this long into the future.