Cage the Elephant @ Albert Hall, Manchester, 19 Jan

Cage the Elephant take no prisoners. The way in which they hit the stage is as broad a declaration of 'IF YOU CAME HERE LOOKING FOR ROCK’N’ROLL TONIGHT, YOU'RE GOING TO GET YOUR MONEY’S WORTH' as you are likely to find. 

Rhythm guitarist Brad Schultz heads straight for the front row of the audience, where he spends much of the next 90 minutes; his frontman brother Matt follows, writhing like a seasoned Mick Jagger impersonator with a sack of ferrets down his pants. They belt out Cry Baby from last year’s Tell Me I’m Pretty, In One Ear from their self-titled 2006 debut and Spiderhead from 2013’s Melophobia. For neatness’ sake we’ll say it takes them three songs to have the audience eating out of their hands.

Matt Schultz doesn’t even have to really prompt the crowd for a singalong. He sticks his microphone in the belt of his trousers and gestures provocatively, the way you’d imagine Liam Gallagher might if you expected him to say, 'come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough'. They play Trouble – the audience does the heavy lifting. They do Punchin' Bag and the crowd is as mental as a crowd can be (to the extent of surging from one side of the Albert Hall to the other, the crowd on the far left falling over just shy of the bar). Yes, at times they sound a little like other bands, usually when they are playing older songs – like the Pixies, say, on Aberdeen, or The Black Crowes on Ain't No Rest for the Wicked, Red Hot Chilli Peppers on Back Against the Wall.

But they are the furthest thing from a lazy band. There’s a definite Brit invasion skein to their sound: you can hear it in songs like Telescope (which could be a Zombies track) and especially Cold Cold Cold (which could be a song by The Yardbirds). It’s this little twist, combined with Matt Schultz’s energetic scissor kicking (which out-Robert-Pollards Robert Pollard), that conjures up Guided by Voices and makes you think that maybe just maybe Cage the Elephant don’t quite get the credit they deserve. Certainly, when they hit their stride, as they do on a brace of their newer songs, the crunchiness of their riffs would have the hardest of hearts exploding like a firework. Listen to Shake Me Down or It’s Just Forever and you’ll see what we mean.

Just about the only question of the night is why they are still touring an album that came out in 2015. But then we realised: the album is good and not enough people have heard it yet. These boys keep playing these songs, sooner or later the world is going to wake up and see what a good time they’re missing.