Thundercat @ Barrowlands, Glasgow, 29 Mar

The cultural perception of Thundercat has always been a curiously broad one. He manages to be perceived as the un-serious person's ‘serious musician’, the bass player with absurd technical ability who uses it to write songs about his cat and chats with his audience about anime and farts between songs, while simultaneously being an artist whose biggest song is about heartbreak, from an album about alcoholism, which in his discography sits between two records haunted by grief.

This tension runs through his live show too. It leads to a slightly uneven start. Introduced with typically self-effacing affability, I Love Louis Cole is great, his darting falsetto weighed perfectly against breakneck drumming. However, the instrumental that it leads into doesn’t quite land, it's all a bit too visible musicianship, a lot of obvious technical skill that doesn’t seem to be serving any real feeling. It is, however, kept afloat by Justin Brown’s jackhammer drumming which by the end has gone full-on happy hardcore, pulling the audience along with it whether they like it or not.

But it’s only after a rather touching childhood anecdote paying tribute to the late Taylor Hawkins which moves into a broader homage to close friends Mac Miller and Austin Peralta that the band really snap into gear. The extended improvisations that follow have far more focus and direction, they seem in a constant state of building, every moment incrementally more fevered, the three members orbiting off on their own tangents but never losing sight of this central momentum. Those bass runs Thundercat has become particularly known for are what really hit, those rubbery tumbles that manage to be all knees and elbows, yet incredibly smooth at the same time, find this meeting of technical dexterity and emotion, sounding like a mosquito trying to tug its way out of quicksand.

There’s this interesting tension between the band's want, nay, need to improvise and the fact that ultimately Thundercat’s best known work is two or three properly great pop songs. There’s a great push/pull thing going on throughout the set with sections of the audience who are visibly less into the longer improvised sections. But it means that once those songs arrive they’re greeted like conquering heroes. Them Changes, in particular, tears the place to pieces with the sheer physical weight of it, its swampy, plunging bass, going from weightless to claustrophobically dense in a matter of seconds. Then Funny Thing swans along, an even giddier head rush of a song live, just full of strutting joy.

These sudden bursts of pop songcraft go to show that Thundercat and his group really are having their cake and eating it too, and, when the band hit their stride, so are the audience.