Except when the designers outplay the perfomer. If Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen had been in town to check out the decor, no pressure need be placed on his unguessed-at capacity for music critique.

Already booked into larger venues to roadshow his actually pretty brill Dreamt For Light Years In The Belly Of A Mountain album, Bush Hall was an opportunity to gape at head-horse Mark Linkous up close.

Alas, the whites of his eyes remained a mystery, as the main-man (geddit?) relied on Dave Stewart's shades (and look) to screen-out the adoring reaction from his beer-fed fans. Though the intimate gig promised much, sweet dreams were, unfortunately, not made of this.

Though its by no means the stuff of nightmares, this Sparklehorse four-piece - augmented later by a steel-guitarist - run through quality-controlled blasts from the past and rockets from the here and now as though zombie-animated by a witch-vetenarian.

An artist of not inestimable facility with mood and tone, Linkous leads his band as though impatient all the messy business of tour and promotion.

Headbangers like Ghost In The Sky and It's Not So Hard are rendered free of any decorative aggregate, assuming the lumpen consistency of reinforced concrete. With the addition of steel-guitar, a misty Morning Hollow almost transcends the air of journeyman detachment, but as Linkous seems intent on driving the whole band home as soon as feasibly possible, much subtlety is cast into the aether.

Bulldozing his way through the set-list, the artist known as Sparklehorse is not quite as we know him. Though visibly no slouch with a gee-tar, Sparklehorse recordings are the careful work of a man determined to to set down a personally representative sound. In the context of a live performance, such control is tricky.

'Neath those defensive shades, its easy to believe that Linkous is dreaming of the magic he can pull out of the retro mixing desk he left back home.

Therefore slow burners like Gold Days and Apple Bed are wearied and ramshackle, lacking the painstaking colouring of the album blueprints.

Weird Sisters aims for a Sigur Rós-style epiphany. But Bush Hall's no smoking signs discourage the idea of any Zippo-in-the-air moments, but the crowd-response had become so muted by this point, that the local fire service were no doubt thinking of clocking off early,

As Mark Linkous led his five-piece band through Someday I Will Treat You Good, one was left to conclude that the time had come to truly deliver on the crackle-voiced promise. And as said tune arrived near the end of this particular show, it remained as promise only.

And 'ang on a minute, was that a fleur-de-lys on that wall? Nice touch, Bush Hall. Llewelyn-Bowen would be chuffed.

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