Jagwar Ma @ Academy 2, Manchester, 21 Oct

You’ve had the worst day. Not just a bad day at work. A real dozen kicks to the balls kind of a day. And Jagwar Ma are there to take you into their loving embrace and tell you everything is ok. 

Not that they actually tell you everything will be ok. They just do what they were put on this Earth to do: provide massive banging tunes that you're unable to resist flinging yourself about the crowded Academy 2 to, as if flinging yourself about to massive tunes is what you yourself were put on the Earth to do.

And they’re canny too, because for every massive banging tune from their debut, Howlin', they ease in a newbie from just-released Every Now and Then to suggest that, you know, all of their tunes are as big and banging as the rest – so new tune Loose Ends is sandwiched between old favourites What Love and Uncertainty; Give Me a Reason is bookended by Exercise and Come Save Me... You get the picture.

It only really works as it should when OB1 (their best new song) manages to build on Man I Need, previously known as the point in a Jagwar Ma show when the roof comes off. But the crowd – basically a huge, undulating thing made up of arms and legs that maybe once were people but are now just organic pulses – don’t care. They are here to dance. And that's what they do.

And yes, it’s a little bit baggy, a little bit Mondays, a little bit Madchester; these Australian boys wear their influences on their sleeves, but for all that they make a great sound and have a good time doing it. Just about the only criticism you could level is that, if you stop dancing a moment, you’ll see frontman Gabriel Winterfield has taken his top off and no serious band ever had a frontman vain enough to show his abs. But we won’t hold it against them. Just yet.