The Notwist, 93 Feet East, London

The eclectic light orchestra's greatest hits

Walking down Brick Lane, London's main Asian thoroughfare, to the small club 93 Feet East is appropriate preparation to see the Notwist, a German band whose music is a series of seamlessly blended cultural collisions.

They began a dozen years ago, playing a kind of post-punk thrash, and there are clutches of excited, hardcore German fans here tonight. But Britain has only really become aware of the Notwist with their new, sixth album, Neon Golden, which twists together pensively introspective, indie-style tunes, and textures ranging from smooth electronica to backporch Americana. It's a melodic and quietly winning record, but it doesn't prepare you for the far more fierce, undeniable experience of this music's mutations played live.

The Notwist look harmless enough, a bespectacled, frizzy-haired quartet of German student types, dropping in on their way to a philosophy class perhaps, seeming a little earnest, and a little distracted. Standing on a low stage, and viewed through a pungent fug of cigarette smoke, the music they make dominates anyway. Markus Acher's gentle, plaintive voice and English-language lyrics are at the centre of things, from one angle, annotating feelings of alienation with sad control. But this capsule of recognisable despair, like a more experienced and resigned version of a Coldplay-type British whinger, is constantly submerged in explosive waves of violent electronic noise of such unpredictability, volume and fury that your ears and mind are engaged far beyond anything Acher can say.

"This Room" is perhaps the Notwist's most successful synthesis tonight. When Acher sings, it's a song about depressed inertia, of an individual or even a culture, the speaker's resistance stopping with its flat description: "We all never leave this room. What are we going to do about it ?"

But the even, circular rhythms that characterise all the Notwist's tunes are broken free from this trap by thrashing guitars and resonant keyboard notes, the band swaying hard to music somewhere between a punk purgative and classical transcendence. This near-chaos closes with the lone, breathy sound of a sax, and the crackle of an old record: pointedly organic, imperfect electronic samples. When a creak from the stage like an opening door blends with the clink of glasses from the bar, this semi-machine music's human ambience is affirmed.

As the set goes on, you begin to recognise the fixed limits within which the band shift combinations of sound, even as new elements – dustbin-lid drums, or sitars – enter the mix. By the encores, what they're doing starts to seem unremarkable, evidence of how rapidly fresh experience goes stale these days.

At any rate, like bands as diverse as their countrymen To Rococo Rot, and Radiohead, they indicate how all the conflicting music around us might yet be usefully fused.