Panda Su, The Glad Café, Glasgow

Suzanne Shaw aka Panda Su would like to make it known that she no longer paints her face to go on stage. Early live forays saw her donning the distinctive dark eyes of her bear namesake, but these days the Fife-based singer-songwriter does without the disguise.

Having hidden behind her alter ego when she was starting out, she’s gained confidence through a series of DIY releases over the last three years. The dark circles around the eyes, she says, are tonight to be seen on her cohort Adam, as they reach the last date on their Scottish tour. He provides a taciturn presence, bringing percussion and sample loops to add to Su’s electric guitar or keyboard.

‘Bee Song’ sets the pattern - minimal percussion blooms into guitar ringing, brooding and pointing to something more ominous beneath an ostensibly quirky song.

New single ‘Maps’ is made of telegraphic beats, a collage of pulsing Morse code that never quite gets to be a mesmerising as it has the potential to be. This pared down live set up makes the sound colder and more electronic – she’s moving away from acoustic guitar to a dark pop vibe.

A delicate glock line shimmers through, but this rather short set of mostly new songs never quite manages to take flight. ‘Alphabet Song’ with it’s nursery rhyme structure is weirdly at odds with the fact of its appearing on the soundtrack to a Jennifer Lawrence make-out scene in horror movie The House At The End Of The Street.

Sparse and minimal, these songs don’t really have the chance to get going tonight. Shaw’s cool, laconic delivery and the stripped down instrumentation of songs makes it hard to decide if she should go the whole way into electronica or if the sweetness in her songs would benefit from more lush backing.