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.