A double dose of wild sounds

The members of Man Man played multiple instruments during their sold-out show. (Aram Boghosian for the Boston Globe)

A Man Man stage looks a lot like a playground, strewn with a jumble of musicians' toys: horns and keyboards, duck whistles and guitars, vocoders and xylophones, and at least one drum for everyone. The noise the Philly-based band makes resembles a riotous recess, except instead of whooping children getting their ya-yas out on the jungle gym it's five exuberant players doing cartwheels and back flips through pop's pleasure ground.

Call it Captain Beefheart-meets-Blue Man Group. Man Man's show at the Paradise for a sold-out crowd of youthful admirers was wild - an idiosyncratic sound sandwich stuffed with frenetic rhythms, Eastern-bloc punk, and carnival noises, falsetto harmonies and noxious growls, lurching blues, crackhead surf, and shambling free-rock. Around 45 minutes into the set the band played "Gold Teeth," a pretty pop song, practically Beatlesesque, and nothing could have sounded weirder. Once you become acclimated to Man Man's baseline of insanity, a simple verse comes as a complete shock.

Singer-keyboardist Honus Honus and drummer Tiberius Lynn faced each other at the front of the stage, their instruments pressed back to back, their three bandmates in a straight line behind them. The group didn't break between songs, it just kept moving, revolving-door-style, from tune to tune, swapping a trumpet for a bass or a metal pot for a guitar. The entire lineup - dressed in signature white - periodically took up sticks for a raucous drum circle.

Man Man drew heavily from its new album, "Rabbit Habits," and also reached back to the group's previous pair of discs during a show that was unflagging in energy and ingenuity but short on focus. The twisted transitions and whimsical contortions were more compelling than the songs themselves, and the show felt like a romp through a patch of punch-drunk musical moments: a fun-filled but cosmically fleeting adventure.

By contrast Yeasayer, another band of genre-bending eclectics, opened the evening with a supremely realized set of worldly prog-rock. Fronted by a swaggering post-punk knob-twiddler (Chris Keating) and a trippy-hippie guitarist (Anand Wilder), the Brooklyn quartet played tunes from last year's debut, "All Hour Cymbals," an epic mash of exotic rhythms and Western pop. The ghost of David Byrne was everywhere, especially in Keating's lurching, yelping delivery. But this is world music by and for a new generation of indie-omnivores, and in concert the group found a sweet spot straddling the psychedelic and urbane, the ritualistic and future-forward.

Joan Anderman can be reached at anderman@globe.com. For more on music, visit boston.com/ae/music/blog.