With a name like Mother and the Addicts, you might expect the band to be fabulously filthy denizens of some Lower East Side drag demi-monde, or an all-girl gang of heavily tattooed, recovering junkies. Moreover, coming on to Josef K's Sorry for Laughing, one of the sacred texts of Scottish pop music, gives any Scottish musician a lot to live up to.

A band launching their second album, Science Fiction Illustrated, ought to have some new sparkle up their sleeves, or at least be bigger, better, harder, faster than they were first time around. Mother and the Addicts sweat efficiently, but don't deliver on any count. Sam Smith isn't a very motherly Mother, bar the odd bit of camping it up. He has terrible orange thrift-shop flares, an eye-boggling op art tie, a regulation Scot-pop quiff that's as 1987 as it is 2007 and - his saving grace - really great cheekbones. He jerks about, playing some appealingly scratchy lead guitar, having perfected the spangly Siouxsie and the Banshees guitar sound (© the late John McGeoch).

To be fair, the band make a good racket. They are much better at groove than melody: Are Other operates at the perfect mid-point between Franz Ferdinand and Hipsway (possibly not the local heroes Mother would hold dearest) as inoffensive, rattling white funk, but might really fly with a better tune. As it is, it is only the pale sibling of Take the Lovers Home Tonight, from the band's first album. Mother rolls his eyes, huffs and puffs and conjures a less dyspeptic Mark E Smith in a 1980s indie-funk band. Indeed, if you squint during the new single Watch the Lines, you can imagine Mother and the Addicts as a disco Fall. You do really have to squint, mind.

· At the Roadhouse, Manchester (0161-832 1111), on August 28. Then touring.