Tall and broad, Antony (he has only one name) has a rugby player's build but the soft, round, benign face of a medieval saint. As soon as he begins to sing, you can hear why this singular New Yorker gained the patronage of Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed - who employed him as a backing singer on his recent world tour.

Fluttering between a keening falsetto and a lower register with all the richness of a mature, black female voice, it's one of those unique instruments that channel emotion with such purity you can't quite believe you are in the same room.

Gloriously, a song like Fistful of Love (a duet with Reed on Antony's forthcoming album, and a kind of distaff take on Reed's own Caroline Says) remains almost too much to bear. There is no breast-beating here, however, no camp dramatics. In the wrong hands, I Fell in Love With a Dead Boy would be tawdry melodrama. Here, it ebbs and flows in delicate spectral sobs.

CocoRosie could learn a little about restraint. Two sisters from New York who appear to have spent much of their lives playing in the dressing-up box and being generally indulged, they sit surrounded by an array of toy instruments. On record, their feline harmonies wreathe songs that sound like the ghosts of the blues, and the effect is dreamlike, strange and entirely intoxicating.

Tonight, the "atmospheric" din generated by various bits of garish-coloured plastic, and the feeling that however lovely this music is, it's also horribly pleased with itself, makes for aggravating listening. There's an alien beauty here, but it has become transfixed by its own reflection.

Despite a background in the intensely precious Downtown arts scene, Antony has no shtick; CocoRosie, meanwhile, have a shtick with which to beat themselves.