Eleanor Moss’s quietly fascinating songs about tenderness and violence inspired a stunned silence in the crowd for this powerfully intimate set at the Poetry Club. A full backing band is all that’s needed to elevate her already transfixing compositions.

The first day of October. The last day of Glasgow’s modest Indian summer. A feeling that the world, in several different ways, is moving on. The park near my new flat by the motorway is largely deserted despite the sunshine, the swans eagerly swimming up to me, unfed. Kids shuffle off to school, parents to their offices, and the concreted lilypond blooms largely unnoticed. I sit there listening to Eleanor Moss on my headphones, snivelling with a freshers flu I thought I’d graduated from. It is an exciting, dynamic season, but sometimes a lonely one too.

What a joy, then, to find myself in a small room with Moss that night, whose hair mirrors the fading leaves in George Square, finger-picked guitar echoing the sound as they fall. The York songwriter’s recent debut album, The Knife, The Needle, is in one sense an exemplary piece of autumnal indie folk. Moss’s deceptively simple guitar-and-vocal compositions are quiet fireside confessionals full of tender reminders that inevitable decay can be as beautiful as it is heartbreaking.

And yet, to shelve The Knife, The Needle with the glut of other vaguely seasonal indie folk artists vying for mainstream attention lately (Lizzy McAlpine, Sarah Julia, Searows, and of course indie folk’s reigning high priestess Phoebe Bridgers, to name a few) would be reductive. A teacher of songwriting at university, Moss’s songs are studied and complex, twisting and turning in unexpected directions, guided by words that are as beguiling as they are concise. “I’m afraid if you show me the knife / I might use it on you babe,” she sings in a characteristically shocking twist in the otherwise serene lullaby Fixer, concluding with Bridgers-esque poignancy: “If you show me where it hurts / I will show you where it hurts”. A distant brass band flounders, strings wilt, the guitar fades to nothing.

It’s understandable that tonight’s set in SWG3 Poetry Club – a tiny redbrick nook through an unmarked black door under a railway bridge in Partick – doesn’t have the space or budget for a horn section, but Matthew Herd has a good crack at recreating the studio album’s rich soundworld with his own blissfully breathy saxophone curlicues. When it’s just Moss and her guitar on stage, her delicate compositions are stunningly quiet, so much so that the ambient sounds start to feel like just another part of her art. We can hear the swirl of cars passing on the A184 outside, the rustle of ice behind the bar, the clink of my keys as I reach to return my earplugs back to their case. Right from the gentle fanfare that opens Fixer, the attention this rapt crowd places on Moss is so intense it seems to take her a few songs to relax into her performance.

When she does relax, the music flows like water. Sarah Waiting in the Car features Moss’s catchiest, most exquisitely tense chorus melody, violence and tenderness again rubbing up against each other in complex and fascinating ways. Clothes in a Hotel Sink, Moss explains, evokes her realisation that touring involves “a lot more refrigerated bread than expected”, and is the sort of splendidly sordid tale of loneliness that MJ Lenderman could have penned. Songs like these are well suited to the solo treatment on stage, Moss’s dolorous falsetto requiring no embellishment or accompaniment. Yet closer The Way That It Feels is diminished without those shimmering vocal harmonies, and the album’s shape-shifting, quasi-jazz interlude Improvisation is sadly omitted entirely.

Sticking mostly just to the traditional guitar and vocals set up tonight also makes Moss’s influences a little too easy to spot. The obvious ones are Joanna Newsom and Joni Mitchell, both of whom Moss covers tonight with what she calls their perfect songs (On A Good Day and Cactus Tree respectively). Moss is not merely a Newsom mimic, but after only hearing tonight’s performance you could be forgiven for mistaking her for one. Sure, she can play guitar with the same virtuosic classical technique Newsom approaches the harp, and is up to the task with Mitchell’s vaulting vocal melodies, but the substance of Moss’s songs offers something genuinely fresh. She deserves a bigger stage.

Perhaps Moss’s most thoughtful and original songwriting comes on Again, My Love, a poignant miniature about life transforming under your nose, and how each new beginning comes with its own sense of grief. “In the absence that it left behind / Something grows in you you couldn’t find / Before the loss” she sings tonight, eyes closed, as if in private communion with her microphone. It’s a reminder that today’s falling leaves make way for next spring’s buds. Loneliness paves the way for new connections. Illness begets healing, emptiness begets fulfilment. I can’t be the only one in the Poetry Club that needed to hear that.

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