With Oasis's lustre tarnished and Travis too innocuous for words, there's a vacancy for a band to haul British guitar music out of the doldrums. The rock press is putting its money on Manchester's Doves, showering them with accolades such as "Oasis on liquid Valium". Luckily, this grisly depiction of a troupe of groggy scallies is some way from the truth. Twin brothers Andy and Jez Williams and Jimi Goodwin may be lost in music - the epic kind that scales Everest and swims the Channel in the space of one song - but they're compos mentis.

On the basis of this final date of their first tour as headliners, however, they may be too much of a niche product to fill Oasis's trainers. Much of their debut album, Lost Souls, is beautiful and complex, but difficult to convey live in a way that both preserves its integrity and keeps the audience awake. It doesn't help that there's no frontdove as such - vocalist/ bassist Goodwin is the nominal leader, but drummer Andy Williams sings their best-known song, Here it Comes, and both suffer from the indie-schmindie disorder that inhibits any display of personality. That's a sold-out crowd, chaps, so stand up straight, stop mumbling and talk to us.

You do get 45 minutes of concentrated intensity for your money, though. Doves play in front of footage of city skylines, open roads and other images that chime with their yearning, aspirational music. As they entwine themselves in Firesuite, an instrumental whose liquid guitar fills evoke (probably unintentionally) Santana, it's hard to believe these people started out nearly 10 years ago as one-hit dance wonders Sub Sub. The only hint of a "dance element" these days is in the whirling, psychedelic build-up and comedown of the single The Cedar Room, whose eight minutes take a long time to pass. This, it seems, is where Doves are at: very long freestyle implosions that forget there's meant to be a tune in there.

Here it Comes is the glorious antithesis of all that, with its concise-yet-soaring chorus that only missed being a national pop anthem early this year because no one bought it. If Doves have more like that one up their wings, they might just make Britrock artistically viable again.