In case you haven’t heard yet, Mercury Rev are back. Best known for 1998’s critically acclaimed Deserter’s Songs, the pop-minded proggy psychedelicists have been ploughing their own wonky furrow for twenty years now.  Seeming to lose their way a little in the past couple of years, their new album, Snowflake Midnight, is by most accounts pretty good. Does it translate well live? Hell yes.

Before the band appear, we are shown a lovingly crafted intro video on the huge screen on stage, accompanied by the otherworldly babbling of the Cocteau Twins. An image of a Ken Wilber book flashes up, but before I can make out which of the bald brainiac’s works it is, the image changes to a young and wild-eyed Iggy Pop. Next comes John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, then a shot of Phil Hine’s book Condensed Chaos. Seeing the chaos magick classic up blown up super-big makes me grin, and it’s a grin that doesn’t really fade for the next one and half hours.

Frontman Jonathon Donahue is still an intriguing elf/goblin combination, with wide eyes and a bottle of red wine that he takes slugs from throughout the show- presumably fuel for his Dionysian revels. We’re not just talking wild air drumming here - although he busts out plenty of that - but theatrical flourishes that coincide with the trippy visuals going on behind him at exactly the right moments.

While similarly psychedelic buddies the Flaming Lips have wandered off into the realms of radio-friendly giant-pink-robot tweeness, it’s becoming clear that the Rev have taken a welcome but unfashionable turn towards the transcendent. Quotes flash on the screen and straight into the nodding crowds’ hypnotised  neocortices- the likes of Allan Watts, Joseph Campbell and Lao Tse Tsung all get a look in. These materialise over constantly moving projections of molecular structures, outer space, and weird sea creatures with big black eyes that look just like aliens, man!

Oh yeah, the music ain’t bad either. Classics from Deserter’s Songs, like the wistful fantasy Holes and encore Goddess on a Hiway, are as beguiling as ever, but it’s the new tracks that really excite. More informed by the sweeping synths, 4/4  beats and build-and-release dynamics of dance music than any kind of hoary old psych-rock, they explode in the room sounding both like classic Mercury Rev and something new and muscular.

As the gig continues the mood in the venue celebratory mood in the venue increases, the crowd roaring with approval. Donahue, with his greying beard, wipes tears from his eyes and looks genuinely appreciative of the reaction the band is getting, while sunglasses-clad guitarist Grasshopper, looking the same as ever, impassively reels out another screeching wall of noise from his axe. 

It all builds to an epic climax with new track Senses Are On Fire. Beginning with Donahue whispering the verses of Talking Head’s subversive Once in a Lifetime (”And you may tell yourself/This is not my beautiful house!”), the song then takes off, the title lyric repeated endlessly over pounding beats, grainy cascading synths and shimmering distortion.

While theirs isn’t the subtlest combination of music and mysticism, it’s an incredibly enjoyable one, even - taken with a bottle of red wine a la Donahue - euphoric. Catch this finely honed cosmic happening while you can. 

Adam Bambury