"I think there's still room in hip-hop for songs with subject matter," declares Pharoahe Monch after Gun Draws, an angry track about gun violence told from the point of view of a bullet. The song Agent Orange, about American foreign policy, gets a cheer audible over even his energetic seven-piece band, so it is clear his audience feel the same way. Long before he is joined for a song by two members of De La Soul and closes with the anthemic, Godzilla-sampling Simon Says, the gig feels less like the overdue return of one of hip-hop's more cerebral voices than a celebration of the art and power of intelligent rhyming.

Two things stand out about this performance. The first is the astonishing command Monch has over his audience, given his wordy complexity. The New York rapper has spent eight years between albums, and his status as an eminence grise of hip-hop's underground means this crowd are devotees rather than the merely curious. Even so, the fact that they hang on his every polysyllabic utterance is startling. Monch acts almost as a conductor, his right hand bouncing and bobbing as each line flows on.

The second is the care and thought that has gone into the presentation of this sometimes complicated music. Monch's band bring a visceral power to the sound that allows its intricacies to shine: they turn Push into a slow-burn southern soul session, recreate a chunk of Amy Winehouse's Rehab for him to rap a typically multilayered verse about the Britneys, Lindsays and Nicoles of the world, and extend the coda of his Elvis-driven new single, Body Baby, turning it into a kind of mutant offspring of OutKast and the Blues Brothers.

· At Clockwork, Bristol, tonight. Box office: 0870 4444400.