★★★★

SOME bands don’t need to be seen live to be fully appreciated. But seeing Wild Beasts on stage is entirely necessary to understand them. This delivers an improvement on newer work which could, to the ear, be that of a bedroom DJ.

In the flesh you get layers not perceived on first listening to latest single Get My Bang. You get closer to understanding why corners of the media gushed, “Wild Beasts are amaaaaaazing,” after they signed to Domino ten years ago.

Their pulse-like punchy rhythms were enhanced by the kind of sub bass only achievable in a venue such as The Old Market. Reduced to a YouTube clip and the sound would be insipid while on a recording it’s another beast entirely.

New material from the album Boy King, paired with pastel lighting and a touch of dry ice, got a polite reception while older songs such as Hooting And Howling and All The King’s Men ignited the crowd into one joyous, gyrating mass.

Promotional material for the Kendal four-piece suggested they were tapping into sexual desire and masculinity, though you would have to interpret their songs in a very particular way to sense this.

It was satisfying to see the instrumentation relying more on the setup of guitars, bass and drums than their newest album makes out. Ben Little’s Burns guitar is still his paint brush but he’s using different colours.

One new track saw him create tones on the bottom string akin to the destruction of a sound wave in its squelching, roaddrill aesthetic.

The other axe player, Tom Fleming, cracked out a solo fit for any metal band – but his patterned motif decorated rather than dominated and to achieve it he had, like Little, layered up several distortions and effects, noticeable in gusts of rasping feedback between notes.

Wild Beasts have increasingly moved away from the legacy of rock ’n’ roll but on stage and turned up to 11 they are at their best.