Like a 3am drunk hoping to get lucky on the way home, Malcolm Middleton's reputation for excess has trailed him through two solo albums and past the demise of his previous band, Arab Strap. A recurrent terrace chant rises up from the crowd, "Alkie Malkie, Alkie Malkie"; Middleton, eyes closed, just gets on with singing his flinty, sad songs in which everyday hopes stub their toes against bleak inevitability.

What has changed, however, is that his new, third album offers up Middleton's most full-blooded rock songs to date. This works fine on record, where his band comes across as a kind of agoraphobic Waterboys. Live, however, it just feels pedestrian, with Middleton - a fine guitarist himself - reduced to playing acoustic rhythm guitar, and ill-served by a clumsy, bog-standard indie drummer and plodding bassist. There is a great deal of prosaic misery here, and it needs the lift offered by more subtle musicianship not to become overwhelmingly leaden.

"I don't wanna sing these shit songs anymore," Middleton sings. Later: "It's only a matter of time before I feel shit again." Elsewhere, he confesses, "I'm only happy when I'm sad, the good times are all bad." Then again, he is describing his "total belief in the depth of [his] unworthiness". Seemingly trapped in a cycle of self-defeating negativity, it is not hard to see the worst aspects of the Glasgow psyche reflected in these songs. ("That's Scotland for you," says my Scottish companion.)

That said, there are moments of undeniable loveliness, mostly in the solo, acoustic encores, but also in the hypnotic grind of Superhero Songwriters, in which Middleton grits his teeth and vows to "start living". There is something Wildean, too, in the way in which he maps the distance between the gutter and the stars. "Your death is a number, but I cannot count that high," he sings, and it is impossible not to be moved.

· At the Audio, Brighton (01273 606906) tonight. Then touring.