"So this is what a Saturday night in Cambridge is like then!" Or as we might call it – Danger Bloc Party.

At first glance – that is, if you can even see over the tall cravat-suffocated gentleman in front– an evening with Kele and the gang may not seem to share much with an average "Danger Night", bar a bizarre burst of Rihanna’s ‘We Found Love’. However, if you peer at the Okereke long enough, you can almost see the same stray thought ticking in the corner of his mouth that bothers the spent smiles of students on Saturday nights: "Maybe I don’t belong here."

Bloc Party’s gig at The Corn Exchange is the end-point of a UK-wide jaunt supporting their latest album Four, with a primary colour aesthetic that emphasised both a back-to-basics bent and the renewed individual importance of each member. The opener ‘So He Begins To Lie’ is given a new lease of life by the band’s secret weapon, the floppy-fringed Russell Lissack, whose guitar riff bounced off every surface in the building. On record, the track feels a tad thin; when played live, it devolves into an all-engulfing maelstrom that strips the make-up off your face.

Unfortunately, except for the made-for-Topman-dressing-rooms ‘Octopus,’ other new material failed to make such an impact. The crowd’s lack of enthusiasm for ‘Real Talk’ even seemed to unsettle Okereke. Like all the best frontmen, his energy matched his audience perfectly, as if his mic cord was plugged into every frayed shoelace or dangled straight into each pint of bitter. In listless moments, he seemed to bellow more orders than the invigilators who tread that stage every June, as the sea of bobbed heads in front of him stood as still as the Cam flowing outside.

Despite these lulls, Bloc Party’s real talents were exemplified in moments like ‘This Modern Love.’ These rapidly flashing frames of intimacy are Okereke’s forte. With heady eyes and curled tongue, he maligns modern romance – the dry contortions of the lips, the empty twists of the sheet and the slow turns of the knife. His vocals threatened as if they poured from a throat dripping with nitroglycerine, and he was seconds away from swallowing a lit match and blowing that bursting-heart sixth form poetry all over the writhing wide-eyed indie girls at the barricade.

The band’s real problems were mainly structural. The set list lacked narrative and the four-piece only played for 70 minutes, while a main set clocking in at a mere three quarters of an hour felt rather on the short side for an act four albums into their career. Bloc Party themselves were incandescent: Kele’s vocals rapturous, Tong’s drumming thunderous. Unfortunately, they failed to beat in tune with the crowd at crucial moments, and the pulse of the hall was pronounced dead. It’s not their fault; the Corn Exchange is neither intimate enough for whispered indiscretions like the tender ‘Signs’ to blaze softly or expansive enough for ‘Banquet’ to burn the place to the ground.

When ‘Helicopter’ finally whirred into life and the tourniquet of new material was torn off, life flowed through the room and it became as chaotic as the mud-devastated field of a spine-tingling summer festival twenty times its size. It was a triumphant end to an uneven evening and remained a rare moment of synchronicity in a perfectly tuned, if sometimes disharmonious, night.