The late Factory Records boss Tony Wilson once said that bands never turn in anything good after their fifth album. Baltimore’s Animal Collective proved him wrong, producing their masterpiece with their eighth. Merriweather Post Pavilion in 2009 was a marvellous record, in which the group turned collages of everything from jungle beats to wind chimes into moments of transcendent, childlike joy.

Seven years on, their hands aren’t quite as steady at the wheel, and the revelation that they made Painting With, their latest album, by hiring a baby pool, dimming the lights and projecting images of dinosaurs on the walls, hardly dispels suspicions that joyful oddity has tipped into wilful wackiness.

Here, they eschew their best-loved songs in favour of a setlist drawn mostly from the album, which proves more troublesome live. There are the familiar collages – everything from Clangers-type squeaks to pop bubblegum and the cackle from the Surfaris’ Wipeout. But vocal “hocketing” (an early-music technique in which two voices sing alternating syllables) is experimental but baffling, and eventually grows irritating.

Animal Collective have never been great showmen, but with the banter-free band huddled behind electronics, there could be more in the way of performance than the sight of Brian Weitz, aka Geologist, torch strapped to his head and rolling about like an acid casualty at Woodstock.

As the lighting gradually becomes more kaleidoscopic, things tiptoe from the inpenetrable towards the sublime. Dancing erupts for FloriDada, a giddy collision of EBM and tribal beats and the doo-wop/surf pop era. Golden Gal – expressing empathy with objectified women – is warm and catchy. Bees, from 2005, in which a sampled strummed instrument (an autoharp?) combines with yearning vocals, is truly lovely, but the expected transcendent experience never comes.

• Animal Collective tour the UK and Ireland in September.