At the stroke of 11pm, Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run" comes booming over the Lee's PA, and the first person we see take the stage is a long-haired brunette wearing a vintage Guns N Roses T-shirt and black leather pants, and flashing devil hand signals. Uh, are we at the right show? The unmistakable figure of Bradford Cox soon follows, assuring us that this is indeed a Deerhunter concert, however the recent recruitment of rock-chick guitarist Whitney Penny is not the only thing that's changed for the Altanta psych-rockers since their last Lee's appearance, back in July 2007.

For one, there's about twice as many people here, the capacity crowd suggesting that the accidental, five-months-early leak of the band's new release, Microcastle, has actually yielded considerable dividends. But the biggest difference to behold is in Cox himself: where he once pranced about the stage in dresses, wigs and finger puppets — all the better to pantomime the emotional tumult of the band's 2007 release, Cryptograms — tonight he appears in simple t-shirt and jeans, holding a guitar, resorting to his trusty vocal-loop effects as punctuation, rather than a security blanket.

The opening one-two of Microcastle's Flaming Lips-lush intro and Pavemented follow-up "Agorophobia" immediately asserts the new album's refined pop focus, and even the record's more exploratory turns — like the exhilarating motorik rocker "Nothing Ever Happened" — are delivered with a rousing gusto that indicates the band's recent experience touring arenas with Nine Inch Nails was time well spent. But even tracks from the more shadowy Cryptograms benefit from this open-hearted approach: stripped of its dense layers of reverb, the lysergic disco of "Octet" is reborn as an ascendant, shout-it-from-the-rooftops anthem that would make Bono flash a Jesus Christ pose in approval.

Cox may have abandoned his traditional theatricality, confrontational aggression and rambling stage-banter for a more subdued stage presence, but he's a much more confident frontman for it, not afraid to let his voice hang in the air unadorned and unaccompanied; arguably, the set's most powerful moment comes in the form of Microcastle's melancholic closer "Twilight at Carbon Lake," where Cox's stark, doo-wop-inspired vocal melody gives way to a climactic, cardiac-arresting thrash. The encore reading of "Cavalry Scars" — presented in the extended "Heroin"-styled drone-jam version heard on Microcastle's companion disc, Weird Era Con't. — seems to chart the band's evolution from volatile misfits to assured art-rock emissaries, culminating in a sight no less disarming than Cox's past cross-dressing exploits: that of the singer happily hammering away at a glockenspiel — at which point, this evening's introductory airing of "Born to Run" feels like less like a joke, and more an accurate precursor to Deerhunter's own moment of triumph.