Blue Aeroplanes @ Ruby Lounge, Manchester, 12 Jan

A memory: hazy but inarguable. The year: 1990. The location: well, best to draw a veil. A breathless Michael Stipe, thanking The Blue Aeroplanes for their support slot on R.E.M.’s Green tour. And an audience, silent and unappreciative, momentarily unseats the singer. “Well, I like ‘em...” he grumbles.

A few days later, and a few hundred miles north, the band recieve a more fitting welcome. And now, nearly three decades and a dozen albums later, their veteran status guarantees them the respect they deserve while their continuing adventures maintain connection with a loyal fanbase. The Blue Aeroplanes are (a little) long in the tooth but, as new album Welcome, Stranger! so artfully demonstrates, they are still far from short of inspiration.

In a lengthy set, that album is showcased in full tonight. Its ten tracks are a stirring addition to their bright canon. Frontman Gerard Langley still performs from behind shades with a careworn, wry detatchment, declaiming a torrent of words as the band journey from a crunching, opening Dead Tree! Dead Tree! to an epic closing Poetland. With, as ever, seven people on the Ruby Lounge's compact stage, the Blue Aeroplanes’ ersatz jangle fills the room and beyond. Behind Langley, dancer Wojtek Dmochowski bends and stretches, violently uncurling his body as the music propels him across the stage.

'Pick a card, any card... wrong!' The Blue Aeroplanes have little truck with nostalgia, so they flick their back pages with care, but the opening of Jacket Hangs prompts gutsy cheers. The hardcore beam and the air is punched: we hit peak foot-tapping. An accompanying ...And Stones is a reminder that since the release of breakthrough Swagger, the album that caught the eye of Athens’ finest way back when, UK indie-pop has rarely – if ever – been executed quite so cerebrally or with such oddball abandon. A cover of Shanks and Bigfoot’s Sweet Like Chocolate, from the new album, is confirmation that they always were as mad as a box of frogs and their signature reworking of Tom Verlaine’s Breaking In My Heart (the unshifting climax of every Blue Aeroplanes show) a reminder that you build, shape and live your own history.