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Okkervil River at Academy 2, Manchester

Three things you can count on:

In Manchester it will rain. This is the first thing and sounds like a tired cliche but is true and this afternoon the rain has been heavy, filling the drains and bringing about a sewer smell to pervade the city and fill the lowest floor of what Will Sheff will call a "four level music processing facility."

You can count on Red High Tops too - this is the second thing - and I broke out a new pair for the wander up Oxford Road to the gig and although it is over twenty years since I first wandered to a gig in Converse. Chuck Taylor, Eddy Current, McCarthy's Larry. They are - or were - Americana.

Crawling out of Americana come Okkervil River. Okkervil River are a third thing you can count on. Will Sheff and his band are an unremittingly excellent collective in all they do. Five albums of intelligent, articulate and fascinating music and a string of live shows that take those songs further than one could have thought.

My definition of a good live performance is that a performer is able to take a song heard hundreds of times and breathe a new life into it, change intonations on lines to tweak context, alter the focus of narratives by dropping or raising vocal sections, embowering surprising and effective emotional layers onto what is already familiar. A good gig sees this happen three or four times. Okkervil River deliver such near magic dozens in occasions measured in dozens.

The band play a very similar set to the last time they played in this venue and while Sheff has not a beard and bassist Patrick Pestorius has shaved his off they look much the same as they did ten months ago. The acoustic guitar that Sheff strikes often and hard, throwing over his back on a well worn strap, is the same well scratched piece which played here last year.

Not reinvention then but rather invention. Invention coming in a performance that never goes beyond the remit of being a rock 'n roll show but rather celebrates the form.

Will Sheff uses a rich understanding of the rock n' roll performance to pull off all the tricks he can to beguile and audience that shows gig experience through it's part greying hair.

He drops to speech leading the audience back to "pause and add your own intentions/right here". He slows a song down to near still lingering over "just one rose/one day/and that was years ago." which cuts a swathe of silence through those collected here tonight in a genuine and affecting way.

Affecting too is the unsettling undertone underlying the Okkervil River catalogue and Sheff's battle torn lover is replaced by a seething menace who "thirsts for real blood/for real cuts..." stalking the centre of attention making you complicit in his crimes.

The beat of "a bad movie/where there is no crying" is pattered out in hand claps while "we sail out/on orders from him..." is intoned by Pestorius stepping out from bassist shadow to share Sheff's stage.

It is Sheff's stage though and he takes it for encore picking his beat up guitar and returns as the devastated lover "to cheat/on Maine Island" slowly, delicately, setting his voice against the embers of the evening.

Ultimately though Sheff lifts the mask a final time concluding the encore out at Westfall with easy murder and examination. Playfully he begs to be examined, to see if you can see the truth in his performance, see the legion in his swollen eyes. "Evil don't look like anything" he finalises daring you to carry on an investigation of what this occurrence, to analyse.

New insights gleaned, the night relies on that.

Okkervil River at Academy 3, Manchester

The stage of Manchester's Academy 3 is too small for Okkervil River.

For sure the six Americans fill the stage - a couple of them make up for the brawn lost in the slighter members - and for sure the multi-instrumental nature that sees guys playing keyboard them swapping to guitar and girls playing anything with strings on it adds clutter but this band are barely able to be contained by such small surroundings.

Okkervil River's singer/songwriter Will Sheff - resplendent in cheap funeral suit and a shocked mop of dark hair picked out against the stage lights - has the kind of charisma that one finds in a Morrissey or a Michael Stipe.

Sheff kicks his band into Plus Ones with the same faltering, ethereal way Stipe had around the time of R.E.M.'s fifth release Document. Comparisons are justified but the band's effort - Pop Lie - suggests they have been noted as does second effort of the night Singer/Songwriter.

Honesty is all here - The liar who lies in his song/And you're lying when you sing along - and Sheff exudes it.

The band's weight of back catalogue inspires devotees and so the songs familiar to most - new release The Stand Ins is their fifth - but are imbued with a freshness from phrasing and playfulness that rebirths every one.

Sheff has the air of practised raconteur telling a new story for the first time. Breathlessly, almost struggling to keep order of his thought as they spill into his songs, he brings a relevance and significance to his performance that fills every word, every line, with life.

No Key, No Plan - a hidden gem on Black Sheep Boy Appendix - which is rattled through with exuberance to the refrain Truly, I don’t think you'll find a happier man giving way to the jaw dropping moment of this gig. The stand out moment of any gig for this reviewer.

A Stone is stripped down to a three piece lament which in turn breaks down to Sheff himself, on stage, cast against white back light finishing off first with guitar and then just a voice. I think that I know the bitter dismay of a lover who brought/fresh brouquets every day/when she turned him away/to remember some knave/who once gave/just one rose [silence, pause] one day [silence, pause] and it was years ago

The sound could have been a pin dropping. A heart breaking. A million gigs colliding together into a single moment of perfection.

Then you see the bulbous eyes that Sheff casts over the room pushed out and puffed from crying too many tears. You see the scratches on Sheff's guitar where the pick has dragged on the upstroke in frantisism, in the need to play these songs right now, in the fact that he, that Okkervil River, really mean it.

They mean the intelligence as well as the emotion. They mean the smart and the heart. These are the things that make them exceptional.

That tattered acoustic guitar of Sheff is thrashed through an anthemic version of For Real and a mesmerised audience are wrapped and as requested clap in speedy time, then slower during Our Life Is Not a Movie or Maybe which for many gigs should be, would be the highlight.

Not tonight though. Tonight Okkervil River are a many facetted band. Lost Coastlines' banjo beginning and second singing by bassist Patrick Pestorius hits as close to perfection as any band gets

John Allen Smith Sails's Sloop John B close is the most exciting thing you've ever seen as it unfurls before you. In Starry Stairs they are playful cutting down sound to allow tape recording of Shannon Wilsey's voice haunting the room. No bookend with Savannah Smiles is the closest to a criticism I can manage.

Too quickly the night starts to end. They leave returning for a mellow, heartfelt, touching Girl In Port that seals the evening breathing in the life, the understanding, the reason why people still play live after the intention of the phonograph. Sheff bleeds the lines I'm a weak and lonely sort/but I'm not sailing just for sport/.../these several year out on the sea/left me empty cold and grey/pour yourself into me.

They close with their Okkervil River Song. They could be anything this band - and a new lexicon is needed to describe how good they were tonight - but they will never be so on the cusp again.

Commercially, creatively, critically anything is possible with wells of song writing and performance this deep.

Okkervil River are the stand out live act of this decade. Wow.