Animal Collective @ O2 Academy Liverpool, 3 Sep

A huge pair of cardboard scissors hang from the ceiling as Animal Collective take to the stage flanked by some equally large Easter Island-esque faces – one grinning, one grimacing. It's a neat visual metaphor that seems to sum up the appeal or otherwise of Baltimore's finest export since The Wire.

While for some the band's day-glo cut-ups of almost every popular music genre under the sun have produced many a transcendent moment (the grin-inducing joy of 2009's Merriweather Post Pavilion, for example), for others their childish wackiness induces genuine anger, as witnessed by some of the scathing reviews for this year's defiantly sugary Painting With long player. 

Tales of recording in a baby pool and calling themselves 'Panda Bear' and 'Geologist' don't help, of course, but tonight AC offer nothing but good times as their kaleidoscopic sound collages embed themselves into the synapses in a way that's far more enjoyable live than on record. While stage craft has never been the band's forte, tonight they seem genuinely spurred on by a packed and sweaty crowd relishing the chance to see them in such a relatively small space. 

While Painting With's more difficult moments merely grate on record, live they benefit from sheer volume: Hocus Pocus drones and squelches its way from the speakers as powerfully one of the band's beloved dinosaurs, while Floridada prompts joyful pogoing and mass singing with its dumb downed distillation of Animal Collective's myriad influences.Their radical cover of Motown staple Jimmy Mack is another wonderful highlight, with the original's pop nous filtered through a mass of reverbed Beach Boys vibes and added shrieking from Avey Tare.

Referencing the band's previous visit to Liverpool seven years ago goes down well with the crowd who will AC to a winning climax, taking in old favourites such as Daily Routine and an ecstatic Summertime Clothes, which survives an amusingly botched intro before landing somewhere special indeed.