Caught Live: Yo La Tengo @ Royal Festival Hall, London

Chance is not something that's altogether synonymous with live music. The band tends to lay down certain markers, perhaps the most obvious being the proximity of the tour to their most recent album release. Fan favourites are a given, and if you're like an overexcited kid on Christmas week, frantically rooting through your parent’s cupboards, rattling every wrapped box you come across, there are usually setlists from previous nights of the tour posted online for your perusal. All too often you know what you are in for, in other words, and any element of surprise has evaporated like chalk dust before you're even inside the venue. But then Yo La Tengo go and Reinvent The Wheel.

The running order for the first of tonight's two 'sets' from the veteran New Jersey rockers is determined by the spin of a novelty game show wheel featuring an assortment of bizarre options. Songs that begin with vowels; recreating a TV show; performing in the guise of side-projects Dump or Condo Fucks - these are just a handful of the possible selections. The wheel duly lands tonight on Condo Fucks, YLT’s rowdy alter-ego group who play garage and punk covers loud, fast and distortion-coated.

The Festival Hall crowd hardly knows what's hit it as the trio proceed to burn through a clutch of British punk and post-punk numbers (a nod to the Britishness of this year's Ray Davies-curated Meltdown Festival, apparently). Barely a word is spoken onstage as rabid variations on The Fall, The Kinks and Television Personalities are dispatched with gusto, the band seldom even pausing for long enough between songs to allow for audience applause. Ira Kaplan writhes around with his guitar, his vocals barely audible over the wash of noise, thick like thatch.

Following a brief interval, Yo La Tengo the genuine article begins. Going with ‘Night Falls on Hoboken’ as an opener, after the energy and sheer volume of Condo Fucks, cuts the atmosphere like a knife. Having been pushed back in our seats previously as the amps approached eleven, this draws us in. Its hushed tones, its intimacy, shrinks the room to the size of a basement, a room heated only by the bodies crammed inside. But as is the way with this most uniquely special of bands, the song cannot be contained, cannot be confined to guitars and drums alone. A continual drone takes over as it reaches its climax: blips, scrapes and shards of percussion emerge, stretching the song beyond what might have seemed possible, what might have been considered melodic.

As they work through old favourites like ‘Season of The Shark’ - which brilliantly emphasises the interplay between the warm sounds of the organ and Ira’s succinct vocals - ‘Autumn Sweater’, ‘Cherry Chapstick’ and ‘Tom Courtenay’, the band maintain a steady balance between soft, hushed tones and more unhinged, fractured meanderings. A bona fide showman, Ira variously thrusts his guitar towards the floor, the ceiling and the amps – at one point even spinning it above his head as the instrument conjures all manner of bizarre and discordant squalls.

After the elongated experimentation of ‘Pass The Hatchet, I Think I'm Goodkind’, on which Kaplan once more takes both his axe and the audience on an ear-shredding trip, the band exit the stage. Half an hour and two encores later, and still no one is sated. When music is equal parts beautiful and unpredictable, as YLT’s back catalogue indisputably is, the audience will always want the show to go on.