Barbican, London
Halfway through this bizarre, semi-operatic production, an electric guitar is lowered on to the stage on a long rope and two men start bashing it with baseball bats. It's at this point I realise I haven't the faintest idea what's going on.
I know the men with baseball bats are Aaron and Bryce Dessner, the songwriting twins from Brooklyn's all-conquering indie-rock heavyweights the National. And, because I've read the pre-show publicity, I understand it's a song cycle based on the 5,000-year-old Mayan creation myth of Popol Vuh, in which twins create the universe. But, in honesty, none of this narrative is clear. The libretto is indistinct, the staging clunky, and the Dessner twins' attempt to crowbar their enthusiasm for baseball into the story makes it all the more confusing.
Yet, for all these deficiencies, the surface dazzle of The Long Count – a multimedia collaboration between the Dessners and visual artist Matthew Ritchie – makes it a beautiful space to inhabit. You can immerse yourself in Ritchie's animations (naturalistic scrawls that have been grainily projected until they resemble MagicEye illustrations) and the Dessners' minimalist compositions. These don't sound anything like the National: most are based around hypnotic, endlessly mutating guitar riffs, with drones and textures provided by a 12-piece orchestra of strings and woodwind.
Vocal duties are shared between the Breeders' Kelley Deal, My Brightest Diamond's Shara Worden and TV on the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe, who pace around the stage in costume as they deliver their songs. Worden's multi-tracked vocals are spine-chilling – a one-woman medieval choir – while Adebimpe's baritone-voiced Dark Lord adds a Shakespearean gravitas to the proceedings.
As Deal closes the show with a grimly beautiful gothic dirge, the audience – who have sat in puzzled silence for 70 minutes – respond with tentative, baffled but warm applause, which seems about right.