A therapy session in 4/4 time: of Montreal live in London

Granted, this is exactly the kind of thing you'd expect to hear on a Monday night in Shoreditch, but the initial signs for the Georgia band's first London show of 2016 didn't seem great. The cavernous venue wasn't exactly at capacity tonight (14 March), and its billing as part of the third annual Convergence Festival - a month-long "celebration of musical pioneers, visual artists and technologists" - billed itself as some sort of multimedia extravaganza, but turned out to be less Warhol's Factory and more of a dodgy rave, with the festival's logo dimly projected onto the Village Underground's walls.

For the first two thirds of their set, of Montreal seemed disengaged - formidable versions of new songs like the discotastic "Bassem Sabry" and tortured Lousy With Sylvianbriar deep cut "Triumph of Disintegration" were a bold way to open the show, but didn't exactly bring the crowd to its knees. Even spirited renditions of their hits - "Bunny Ain't No Kind of Rider" and "Wraith Pinned to the Mist (And Other Games)" - seemed somewhat rote; having played some of these songs at least 500 times by this point, Kevin Barnes can't exactly be blamed for going through the motions, but it never seemed so obvious to me before.

Addressing the crowd for the first time in the night, Barnes introduces one song by warning the audience that they're about to hear what sounds like a bunch of fragments, but they're really all one track. "I guess I'm getting to that age where I'm going through my inevitable prog rock phase," he joked, pulling an endearing woe-is-me face immediately afterwards. He needn't have worried - "Like Ashoka's Inferno of Memory", the last track from 2015's Aureate Gloom, was the breakthrough the night needed. It makes little musical sense (much, in all honesty, like most of the material from that record), but its restless nature sums up the of Montreal experience in miniature, which probably explained why it was the moment Barnes and co finally looked like they were having fun up there.

From then on, it was back to the hits, but by that point the tide had turned - not only had the venue somehow become exponentially busier, but old favourites like "The Party's Crashing Us" and "She's a Rejecter" were played with all the fervour of a garage band bashing out those songs for the first time. And when Barnes removed his scarlet jacket during "Plastis Wafer" to reveal a sleeveless blouse and assless trousers, you could tell he'd been waiting for that moment all night. It may be a hard look for anyone to pull off, let alone a man in his early 40s, but Barnes nailed it. Who'd have thought?

They end with "The Past Is a Grotesque Animal", the centrepiece of their career-defining 2007 album Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?. It's a track they rarely revisit - a (literally) blow-by-blow evisceration of the first breakdown of Barnes's marriage - and the pained expression on the frontman's face throughout the song demonstrates why. Trudging over the same four chords and relentless beat, it was as uncomfortable as it was transcendent - a fact not lost on the audience, who stood rapt throughout the track's twenty-minute running time, all clearly wishing it could carry on for at least double that. There are some concert experiences that are nigh on impossible to put into words without veering into Pseud's Corner territory - this was absolutely one of them. It was less a mere performance and more of an exercise in catharsis. A therapy session in 4/4 time, worth missing your last tube home for.

Back to our snobbish friend in the crowd, then. A band in decline? Hardly. While there may not have been any new songs in tonight's set - the band's as-yet-untitled fourteenth album is reportedly due in summer - of Montreal demonstrated that you can always breathe new life into old standards. Sometimes it just takes a while.