As even U2 – who tour their 1987 opus, The Joshua Tree, again this year – have realised, veteran bands find it hard to get even diehard fans interested in new material. No such problems for Bristol art rockers the Blue Aeroplanes. Described in the Guardian last week by comedian Stewart Lee as “Philip Larkin fronting Television,” songs from their 14th album, Welcome, Stranger!, are greeted with as much rapture as the oldies.

Like the Fall, Gerard Langley’s band are a cult concern who keep fresh through constant evolution. There are now so many ex-members (at least 48) that the band’s own T-shirt asks: “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Blue Aeroplanes?” However, the latest, seven-piece lineup deliver songs that, like sound-similars (and longstanding Aeroplanes fans) REM, bring a majestically poetic, literary edge to punky, psychedelic rock’n’roll.

With Langley, all sunglasses and elevating hair, looking like a character from a David Lynch film, a 90-minute setlist finds room for songs from 1990 Top 40 album Swagger, an ode to a dead tree and another newie about hope, set in the unlikely scene of an Elvis festival (“You sing badly, but no one cares, because you’re Elvis”).

Jacket Hangs sounds evergreen as ever, but the metaphor for the band’s endurance is rubber-limbed dancer Wojtek Dmochowski. The prototype for Happy Mondays’ Bez, he is well into late middle-age, yet hurls himself around the stage with such joyful abandon that Langley might not actually be joking when he deadpans: “He’s got a fitness DVD out shortly.”

• At Rescue Rooms, Nottingham, 18 January. Box office: 0115-896 4456. Then touring.