The Shins @ Academy, Manchester, 22 Aug

When they last rocked up at Manchester Academy, in November of 2007, The Shins had a very different look about them – they were still the band they’d started out as, more or less. Now only frontman James Mercer remains from that line-up and there’s no question that The Shins is now basically his solo project, with Mercer having effectively remade the group in his own image not long after that last Manchester show, in support of third album Wincing the Night Away.

A radio session notwithstanding, Mercer never made it to Manchester back in 2012 when he was out promoting Port of Morrow, so tonight’s visit behind March’s Heartworms feels well overdue. Perhaps that’s why, rather than test the audience too much with a slew of new material, Mercer leads his new-look band into a veritable victory march through the back catalogue. We open with Oh, Inverted World’s Caring is Creepy and fire through the well-loved likes of Girl Inform Me, Kissing the Lipless and Mine’s Not a High Horse from the early days, as well as what might well be the evening’s standout, an utterly gorgeous rendition of Mercer’s paean to marital cold feet, Gone for Good.

He’s happy to step into rock and roll mode when the moment calls for it, too, with new drummer Jon Sortland on particularly exuberant form on So Now What and The Rifle’s Spiral. The new cuts, when they arrive, are warmly greeted – especially the quietly pretty Mildenhall, about Mercer’s upbringing on RAF bases in England. But it’s when they fire through epic takes on Saint Simon and Sleeping Lessons – the latter closing the show and bringing the house down, especially when Mercer interpolates Tom Petty’s American Girl into proceedings – that you realise that The Shins’ back catalogue is perhaps undervalued these days. By the public that is, not Mercer himself – this is as loving a tribute to those records on his part as the fans could ever have asked for.