The Willard Grant Conspiracy are like a travelling therapy group. This loosely-knit collective orbits around songwriters Paul Austin and Robert Fisher, with Fisher also serving as lead vocalist and raconteur. Behind the measured, sometimes majestic contours of their music, the pair are engaged in a lengthy process of self-healing. Fisher is slogging his way back from years of drug and alcohol abuse. Austin, the adopted child of a fractured marriage, acknowledges that, inside his head, "a few pistons are blown".
The Union Chapel, with its pews, pulpit and leaking roof, seemed custom-made for the band. Fisher, a huge barrel of a man in thick-framed glasses and a lumberjack's check shirt, relished the overtones of sin and redemption so much that he tried making his stage announcements without the microphone, addressing his congregation like a non-conformist preacher until the punters yelled that they couldn't hear. This was a shame - his introductions provide a sense of the primitive, unseen America which fertilises the Conspiracy's music.
With eight musicians squeezed onstage, the songs take a while to achieve lift-off, but when they're flying it can marvellous. Melodic lines bounce between keyboards, mandolin, guitar and viola. Images of death, failure and suffering shudder through the songs like the creaking wheels of an undertaker's wagon. "I'm wicked in the eyes of the world, I'm everything nobody wants," Fisher sings in Wicked. Amid the sparse falling cadences of Massachusetts, he finds himself snowbound and alone: "They say that everything will be all right, it never seems that way this time of night." Time and again, he announces songs about hangings, murders and drunkards. The mere title of Love Has No Meaning says enough.
They make an effort to send us home feeling at least slightly reassured. The Work Song is a communal singalong designed to generate togetherness, while The Visitor is built around raging, Velvet Underground-like crescendos like primal therapy in sound. But you sense the Conspiracy still have many miles to travel.
• Edinburgh Attic tonight; Newcastle Corner House tomorrow; Manchester Hope & Grape Wednesday; then tour Ireland.
