What a curious, synthetic experience it is to see Chvrches. Not that there’s ever anything amiss with pop feeling synthetic. What makes Chvrches odd is the disconnect between their live sound, a pulsating electronic wallop, and their pervasive sense of niceness. Everything about this band is black except its soul. This is vanilla EBM; goth for people who are afraid of the dark.

The Scottish trio’s first UK show since the September release of their second album, Every Open Eye, is a polite affair. But it can also be loud, visceral and bass-heavy. Singer Lauren Mayberry is a personable, self-effacing stage presence between songs, but not quite big enough during them. She is, she tells us, aiming for “60% fun”. She’s being wry, but that seems about right.

To enjoy Chvrches, take them for what they actually are: a dynamic bubblegum group with a taste for sombre clothing and a pulverising low-end to their bright, sweeping tunes. It’s music whose covert debt to Stock, Aitken and Waterman is as hefty as their overt debt to Depeche Mode. The hectic chimes of Make Them Gold aren’t a million miles from one of Kylie’s great Hi-NRG hits.

There are moments in this show when one can even imagine Gore and Gahan’s crew reinvented as a J-pop act. Chvrches are a highly stylised facsimile of something already very familiar; the form of the thing, the shape of the thing, but not the substance of the thing. No latter-day Johnny Cash will ever transform a Chvrches song into a hymn of hurt. But that is the point: the show offers a safe, clean aural drug; the rush without the comedown. No cause for alarm. Nothing’s bvrning vnder the shiny, wipe-clean svrface.

• At Bristol Academy, 17 November. Box office: 0117-927 9227. Then touring.