"We see this as the last show on the Relationship of Command tour," squeaks hyperactive hairball Cedric Bixler-Zavala. "We just can't believe it took 12 years to finish it." Back in 2001, Texan post-hardcore legends At the Drive-In broke up in the wake of their seminal third album, after the blazing hype and relentless touring spotlit their long-brewing musical differences and the drug problems of Cedric and guitarist Omar Rodríguez-López. Just how much musical difference and drugs were involved? The pair have spent the intervening decade making 75-minute math-prog concept albums about ouija boards and coma victims as the Mars Volta. Quite a lot, then.

Tonight, at the climax of a brief, one-off tour Omar has called "a nostalgia thing", we finally get the artistic compromise Cedric and Omar may have been happy with in 2000. There are plenty of frenetic punk blasts such as Pattern Against User and Catacombs – songs that treat time signatures like cats treat wool, include snippets of the Smiths' That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore and offset Cedric's drill-sergeant-on-helium squeal with guitarist Jim Ward's melodic chants. But these often give way to protracted acid-prog interludes during which Cedric performs wired waltzes and blows into an air-powered melodica keyboard that we shall call a synthalizer. These sections can drag, but they do give the seditious soul band hidden beneath the hardcore on Napoleon Solo and the ponderous Quarantined room to writhe.

Otherwise, with a steaming pot of coffee as his only visible stimulant, Cedric has lost none of his live-wire energy and geeky panache. He performs his trademark star leaps off the drum riser during their big hit One Armed Scissor and jabbers between songs about the facile nature of Facebook, how his mic stand is "one part Dalek" and the difficulties of hitting on girls while smelling of Burger King. It's his boundless vivacity that makes At the Drive-In's belated final screening such a charmingly cranky comeback.