Death from Above 1979 / Turbowolf @ The Ritz, Manchester, 24 February

“Did anybody see us a few months ago, across the road?” Therein lies part of the problem with tonight’s Death from Above 1979 show. They’re up on stage at The Ritz – which holds 1500 people – and the gig that drummer and vocalist Sebastien Grainger is referring to, from last October, was opposite at Gorilla, a much more intimate club that holds 700. As was the case when they launched their UK comeback at the other end of Oxford Road, at the Academy, in 2011, the room feels a little bit too big for them tonight – and they don’t help themselves by omitting some genuine classics, instead opting for a few too many deep cuts.

Bristolian hard rockers Turbowolf deliver a suitably noisy support slot at least, previewing a slew of tracks from their forthcoming sophomore LP Two Hands that can match the evening’s headliners all the way for energy and sheer volume. Death From Above 1979’s tour backdrop for their reunion was a thing of genius – a cartoon depicting them rising as zombies from a headstone marked with the name of the band – but tonight, the simple elephant heads logo indicates that there is to be genuine continuity to this reformation. Opener Turn It Out is typically brutal, Jesse Keeler’s manic bassline hitting every bit as hard as it did a decade ago.

New album The Physical World was a sturdy follow-up to their debut, but largely fizzles tonight in front of a crowd that seems disinterested in the new material, Trainwreck 1979 excepted. They’ll have been further aggravated by the inexplicable omission of Blood on our Hands and Black History Month, two stone-cold DFA fan favourites, and whilst the mammoth riff on Romantic Rights threatens – as usual – to tear a whole in the roof, it doesn’t quite claw back the momentum lost during the newer numbers.