Thirty years into their career, Cleveland art-punks Pere Ubu remain engaging mavericks. Singer David Thomas was never slimline and now, vast of girth and walking with a stick, he resembles an avant-garde butcher. Swigging from a hip flask and resplendent in a plastic apron, Thomas plays the fool and gets away with it because Pere Ubu still sound cerebral and thrillingly visceral. He even finds time for a tragicomic existential lament: "How did the postpunk generation get to be 50, huh?" Inside this fat man, a skinny musical militant still flails to get out. There is no place for butchers' aprons, hip flasks or comic monologues in the world of Spiritualized frontman Jason Pierce. Pierce has long adhered to the musical mantra that minimal is maximal, his band's gigs being an orgy of tidal drones and epic circular guitar riffs. Seated, as usual, side-on to an audience that he resolutely ignores, the shaggy-haired Pierce doesn't do small talk.

Not that we'd hear him, anyhow. In pitch darkness, and surrounded by seven musicians with the volume turned up to 11, Pierce orchestrates Spiritualized's trademark excess of repetitive hammer-chords and lush symphonics. They are fantastically tight, lost in the inevitability of their precocious, pulverising riffs, which suddenly give way to sweet gospel testifying. The intensity of the thrashed chords appears to border on the sociopathic.

Yet Spiritualized's past two albums, 2001's Let It Come Down and last year's Amazing Grace, have failed to equal the impact of Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space, their sublime 1997 hymn to narcotic oblivion. Next to that album's Broken Heart, a gorgeous paean to the needle and the damage it does, newer material such as Hold On sounds reduced and rehashed. It seems Pierce has taken Spiritualized so far out that he isn't sure where they can go next, and after 100 minutes of bludgeoning, cluster-bomb riffola, the exit lights blink invitingly.