This might be a pretentious review. But it might be just right. It was hard to watch Wild Beasts, to get a bead on their look, which might be the fragile kid with a busted nose in a sickly-lit bus shelter. Or it might be the big kid who smacked him in the first place, but who is now hanging around to try and say sorry.

It was hard because this was the second of three nights at Koko - they explained this humbly as "being allowed to have the best night of their life three times over". It was hard because the place was packed out with middle class natterers trying to loudly lay claim to understanding something before it had happened, and lads toughing their way to the front with their girlfriends pushing past behind them.

But ignore them. Ignore that. Find a perch and take this in.

The two singers leap from baritone to falsetto - they can both do it, astoundingly. I thought one of them took one end of the scale and the other the other. Hayden Thorpe's extravagant, ecstatic voice, every so often catching into a scratching, guttural rasp. Tom Fleming's Richard-Hawley-covers-Queen growl filling the whole of your chest. The post-rock thump and tumble of the drums, battering through Koko's monster sound system. Simple little nuggets and sprays of guitar glistening and jittering through the reverb.

They're so compelling, these odd boys. They have that vital ingredient of great bands, where you want to be in their gang, where if you desperately need to be got they might get you. Like Morrissey were he still capable of looking outwards, they tell perfect stories with magnificent hooks, dotted with phrases of undeniable poetry. At the same time, it's loaded with a sadness, some mouth-sickness at the state of things inside and outside their psychic bedrooms. They seem like lads from the 20s or 50s who missed out on going to war and don't know what to do with themselves.

The bulk of Two Dancers and the best of Limbo, Panto are performed. Instruments are swapped, moments of virtuosity are delivered without fanfare and go unapplauded, but the whole of it is outstanding, and the natterers start to shut up. They close on Cheerio Chaps, not one of the singles, and it's a lovely goodbye.

There wasn't too much singing along during the gig - these aren't easy notes to attempt - but on the way to and from, the air is alive with giddy impersonations of falsetto. Whether these are attempts to identify and engage with the extravagance, or an attempt to put some ironic distance between the sexy, creepy intensity of it, I don't know.

Spiritualized play Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space for Don't Look Back.

Every Christmas I tell myself I'm going to get to a Christmas Carol concert, and every year I forget. This year I went, inadvertently, and it's made my Christmas already.

Ladies and Gentlemen... is being re-released with the studio layers separated out and sequenced for fans to dig into, and the Presley estate-approved version of the title track (with interpolations of 'Can't Help Falling In Love With You') restored. But live the layers are all present: a string section followed out by a brass section, a choir, a percussionist replete with glistening brass kettle drums, then by Spiritualized themselves, and finally Jason Spaceman taking a seat, a guitar, and resting his foot on a pedal.

No intros. A hush descends, a clip of the processed voice that introduces the record, and everything starts to unfold. The Don't Look Back concerts can hoover up great bands and put them into an LP-shaped box to meet the demands for familiarity that middle-aged indie fans require from their gigs, but here the faithfulness to the album is tempered by the absolute power and grandeur of it. The LP is clearly exactly as it's meant to be, and here it's reproduced with such power, craft and collective intensity as to sound born anew and borne aloft. Everything crackles and burns or pulses or hums, discordance piled on harmony, a perfect midpoint between Phil Spector, Steve Reich, Brian Wilson and Suicide. Lazy references to bands as midpoints of venns of other bands count here, as Jason is in love with those bands, and has set out to evoke them throughout his career - but by dint of his confidence and ability he's never buried by them.

Come Together is utterly stunning and powerful, with not a single part of the orchestra wasted, but it’s surpassed by I Think I'm In Love, which builds in diaphanous, towering layers from hymn to prayer to sermon. It is a record about retreat from heartache into love for opiates, but this doesn't sound like retreat; it sounds as thrilling as escape. The switch from buckling, intense, jazz-psych freakouts (although always deliberate and plotted) to blissed-out nursery rhymes carries on, and the sheer intensity of it all doesn't let you disengage for a second. Later, a battery of strobes join in to try and take the audience away through a total sensual assault, and it cracks right through.

After Cop Shoot Cop's loping, jaw-grinding intensity ebbs away, Jason thanks the crowd, claps the band and orchestra, and leaves, but is soon back out for a non-album treat – finally Silent Night is given the full dope-bliss Spiritualized treatment. Agog with happiness and Christmas cheer, I stumble out of the Barbican, drunk on something better than mulled wine.