Touring one country can be tiring; playing four European cities - Paris, Berlin, Oslo, London - in five days must be utterly exhausting. No wonder the New Pornographers' frontman, AC Newman, radiates the manic intensity of someone on the brink of collapse. To his right, Blaine Thurier appears to have fallen asleep standing up at the keyboard. His leg's nervous twitch to the beat and the occasional heavy thud of his right hand as it switches from one drawn-out chord to another are the only signs of life.

The band's performance is caught between these two extremes: everything they play sounds at once frantic and leaden. Any subtlety they have on record is lost. Kurt Dahle appears to be whacking the drums with a sledgehammer, while Newman and Todd Fancey could almost be plucking their guitar strings with pickaxes. Factor in the appalling speaker system at Koko, which attacks every song the way a chainsaw might demolish a fruit tree, and what you are left with is power-pop that is all sinewy power and no sweet or engaging pop.

That's a pity, because occasionally you get hints of what the show could be. In Unguided, there is a wonderfully uplifting moment when the key suddenly changes and all the instruments fall back to allow Kathryn Calder's pretty, pastel voice some air. Testament to Youth in Verse opens in a frenzy, but when it calms down and its chiming vocal kicks in, it is glorious. For a moment, All the Things That Go to Make Heaven and Earth skips about like a mischievous pixie, but soon that, too, becomes relentless and obstreperous. What a shame that fatigue should make a band unable to maintain breeziness or a lightness of touch.