Doom and desperation are frequently the building blocks of Mark Lanegan's music, but he's looking pretty good on it. Lean, lined and exuding San Quentin-style ruggedness, Lanegan stands motionless at the microphone growling out his lyrics in a subterranean baritone, like Lee Marvin nursing a Jack Daniel's hangover and a Jim Morrison fixation. Except that Lanegan's favourite mood-modifiers have tended to be heroin and crack, leading him into brushes with the law and the kind of scenarios recounted in When Your Number Isn't Up, the opening song on his fine new album, sardonically entitled Bubblegum.

However, there's more to creating Lanegan's dark, splintered sound than meets the eye: tonight, outside the finely tuned laboratory of the studio, some of the required components have gone missing. On disc, the lyrics being ground out by his dark and slatey voice emerge pretty clearly, and Lanegan draws you in as the compellingly existential narrator of his own rock-noir fables. In the Academy - a claustrophobic, airless box tucked away in a shopping arcade, where you can swelter in the crush downstairs or go upstairs and watch the act on a TV - his voice melts down into a feral mumble, a mere component in the band's total sound rather than its focal point. Since the stage is lit - barely - in sepulchral green or muted ultra-violet, and Lanegan is careful never to tread anywhere near a spotlight, the performance takes on a weird feeling of anonymity.

Hence, the point of much of his band's work is dissipated, although there's still much to admire in some carefully wrought interplay between guitarists Brett Netson and Michael Barragan, with spiralling acid-filigrees springboarding off grunting chords and stark riffs. Lanegan cranks his squad up to a storming finale with Methamphetamine Blues, leaving the stage to let the musicians find their own conclusion. But overall, a bit of a waste.