Thursday 19/05/11 Sufjan Stevens @ Apollo, Manchester

It's a cosmic and intergalactic exploration of spectacular proportions. So runs Sufjan Stevens touring with 'The Age Of Adz', and rarely have the incongruities stacked up on such a colossal scale. The darling indie folk multi-instrumentalist shows visionary derring-do to stage an intergalactic pop extravaganza that takes in all manner of cultural earmarks - intrepidly, the Sun Ra Arkestra meets Flaming Lips, exchanging costumes with Prince, Elton John and Flash Gordon, while Barbarella is getting a good ogling from Hair the musical. The mini-orchestra features brass, double drums, squiggly electronic pulsations, erzatz beats and Toni Basil-like high jinx pop-choreo. And like all good journey's, we fly by the seat of our pants and know not where it ends.

The show opens with 'Seven Swans', lilting banjo and harmonic vocals reach for reverberating thunderstruck cresendos which light up a collossus of a set, with Stevens et al wearing Icarus wings, shiny silver suits or flouro-glo. Stevens gives a departure lounge address - It's a journey on spaceship earth through inner and outer space he explains, by means of soundwave mosaic, with movement and eurythmy, a reconciling of the opposites, it's about relationships, and if it doesn't work out you can always dance. 'Too Much' makes for kitsch space-pop, but title track 'The Age of Adz' is the sonic cod-operatic beast with space boots - a gorgeous love song to the apocalypse that features all the anthemic and booming bombastic orchestrations of Stevens' band. While 'I Walked' is an ultra shiny space-age nugget that shimmers with choral harmonics, celestial keys and skittering beats.

It's all pretty heady stuff that Stevens takes down intermittently by strumming folk-songs, whether the surprise of REM's 'The One I Love' or his 'Sister', one for which he says he's reclaimed the moronic sounding 'duh' tone and requests audience participation with duh duh duh's, while 'Futile Devices' is adorned by keyboardist Zardark the Explorers Casio ZK1. Stevens takes an engaging-while to explain mid-set about how langauge is repressive and that the inspiration for 'The Age Of Adz' was a certain outsider artist named Royal Robertson who had visions of the apocalypse as well as 8 kids, and drew in cartoon of  visiting aliens and hot chicks with big boobies; while formative years meant that Stevens had reconciled the fact that he was of the space people, the band had to show blood samples and cosmic credentials to be star people in the band. Stevens jokes not knowing what music they're playing - whether it's psych-rock, space-camp or Fraggle-rock, while visually the lysergic treats draw from Royals' illustrations set to video work by Deborah Johnson.

Musically, it feels like 2050 future-pop - 'I Want To Be Well' runs amok with euphoric rave pulsation - with Stevens singing “I'm not f*cking around”, 'Get Real Get Right' throbs with aerobic-pop, and the harmonic treat 'Vesuvius' is bathed in radiant volcanic light. The visionary epic 'Impossible Soul' closes the Adz set. It encapsulates just how bold and daring the adventure is in this age of cynicism and economic implosion, a 25 minute kitsch-opera with a Aquarian Age ideals, ticker-tape explosions, monkey masked Stevens, and anthemic Curtis Mayfield-like mid-sections - “Boy, we can do much more together, it's not so impossible”.

After the longest whooping wailing call for an encore in Christendom, Stevens returns unadorned in T and jeans to solo piano on old fave 'UFO Sighting' and strum 'Casimir Pulaski Day' to audience duh duh duh's, while the triumphant calling card 'Chicago' closes with balloon release to the euphoric playpen. The scale of the spectacular is a call to our collective imaginations, and Sufjan Stevens may well prove the Cosmik Hobo to turn us Starboard. “Boy, we made such a mess, together.”