Neko Case's Dingwalls gig is almost a masterclass in how not to play live. She is here to promote her recently released third album, Blacklisted, but succeeds only in making you wonder whether the album is actually worth listening to. Blacklisted is wonderful: a luxuriant marriage of country twang and torch-song bluesiness, on which Case is equal parts Dolly Parton and Peggy Lee, singing one moment of grass in the valley, the next of dark and dangerous obsession. Its richly textured songs are seductive and mesmerising. At Dingwalls, however, they sound pedestrian and drab.
That is largely because the songs have been stripped of all body, leaving little more than scraps of meat on bone. Case, strumming mildly on an electric guitar, is accompanied by just two musicians: Jon Rauhouse, who plays craggy banjo and wobbly slide guitar with undoubted finesse but varying amounts of energy, and Daryl White, who plucks relentlessly at a double bass, transforming each song into a plodding, treacly dirge. Watching White, you wish Sweet Sue, the bandleader from Some Like It Hot, would burst in and order him to sharpen up and give it some swing. Occasionally - on the druggy, crimson-hued Pretty Girls, for instance - his monotonous rhythms sound plush and hypnotic; for the most part, however, they are thuddingly dull.
Admittedly, the sound quality at Dingwalls is not great, and the trio are plagued by technical difficulties. That Case rapidly becomes fractious, fretting over her monitor and her out-of-tune guitar, is understandable but hardly engaging. She is usually a beguilingly impish performer, but that quality emerges only in flashes, mostly in her teasing responses to salacious heckles. Her banter is otherwise limited to plugging the album and a tour-only CD, a task she undertakes in a sardonic tone that strives to subvert the whole notion of promotion, but falls woefully wide of the mark.
Her voice, at least, is faultless. It has a quartz-like beauty, flecked with warmth and colour. On Furnace Room Lullaby, her gradual ascent from sultry huskiness to a translucent, siren's yodel is breathtaking. But there is no escaping the sensation that this is just another night in a long and exhausting tour - and that is a feeling no audience enjoys.
· At the Barfly, Glasgow (0141-221 0414), tonight, and Whelans, Dublin (00 33 1 478 0766), tomorrow.
