As a band who bonded over a love of schlock horror flicks, the Ghost Frequency should be adept at coping with nightmares. But singer Doran Edwards looks distinctly timid as he battles the badly mixed sound sucking the life out of his songs. Pushing back oil-slick strands of hair, he makes repeated requests for the volume to be turned up. "I feel like I'm playing at somebody's nan's wedding," he sighs.

The atmosphere is not quite as staid as the frustrated frontman thinks, but it is a letdown for the five friends who have just escaped the bedroom in north-east London where they carefully plotted their comic book-inspired carnage. Just as Scream dissected the elements of scary movies, the Ghost Frequency have broken down what makes the nu-rave generation hit the download button, and come up with a combination of the Rapture's electropop and the posthardcore of At the Drive-In.

Edwards, however, is exasperated by the apathy of the densely packed crowd. "I'll give a fiver to the first person who dances," he says. "Shake your shit." When no one bites his hand off, it is left to Edwards to prowl the stage, bent double, before climping atop the drums and springing from a speaker almost on to the back of the all-singing, all-dancing synth-fiddler Barney Ward.

Yet Edwards' rich, dramatic voice never wavers, gilding often predictable songs. London Is Fucking Dead never lives up to its title, and for all Money On the Fire's talk of "experiments under the cellar", the shouting and Space-Invader bleeps are formulaic fun. But the grinding rock that lurks in Nightmare and bursts into shrieking life in Never Before Have I Seen a Man Alive That Looks So Exactly Like a Skeleton, turn the Ghost Frequency from fashion victims to likeable zombies who could just claim a few souls.

· At The Sugarhouse, Lancaster (01524 63508) tonight. Then touring.