The official Crimea story is a fairy tale involving leader Davey MacManus and a chance meeting with Travis's Fran Healy in Sainsbury's. Next thing you know, the London guitar quintet are medium-hot tips for 2006, praised by enigmatic novelist JT Leroy and high on their record label's "to break" list. That's all true, and you can appreciate why Healy was impressed enough to introduce them to the right people, but their seamless confidence at this show owed itself more to a decade of hard knocks. They've been around since the 1990s, formerly as the Crocketts, and, in their current incarnation, were also hot tips back in 2003. This time around, though, there's a right-place-right-time buzz.

The 100 Club's full house - some of it lured by the current hit single, Lottery Winners On Acid - were infatuated by MacManus, the archetypal poetic Irishman. I overheard a woman, clearly old enough to know better, coo: "He's my puppy." Presumably, the adoration was welcomed by the singer, who admitted he's not exactly a new kid on the block; "I'm showing my age with this one," was his preamble to an incongruous cover of Fleetwood Mac's Everywhere. Lilting and silvery-light, it stood out as the one number that didn't reduce him to spasms of jerking anguish. Anguish is his group's stock in trade, whether parcelled up as a deceptively giddy love song in Lottery Winners (he's so cripplingly besotted that "if she gets bird flu, I want bird flu") or brutally thrashed out on It's Not Easy Being Weird.

Though technically mid-tempo rock in a Lightning Seeds vein, each song was treated as a mini-epic, with its own sound (fairy-chimes on Long Time Coming; stark, hollow-eyed rapping on Opposite Ends) and own debilitating effect on MacManus. Breathless and wrung out by the end, he didn't look as if he'd be fit to play again for weeks. Apparently this happens at every show. Catch them before he succumbs to exhaustion.

· At Soultree, Cambridge (01223 477900) on Wednesday, then touring.