Tindersticks have just released their first album in five years. With typical understatement, they are introducing it with this single British gig, and they have gone to great lengths to make it one to remember. The three remaining members of the original lineup, singer Stuart Staples, keyboardist David Boulter and guitarist Neil Fraser, are augmented tonight by strings, horns and an electric band, enlarging the sparse music until it achieves a crepuscular magnificence.

And yet an uncomfortable truth gradually emerges. Not a group to do things by halves, they wade straight into the new record, The Hungry Saw, and don't stop until they'd played the whole thing plus 10 old songs, by which time it is clear that the point where enigmatic melancholy becomes dinner-party tinkling is around the 45-minute mark. Subsequently, the senses disengaged, Staples's one-note mumble coats lyrics in an impenetrable fog.

But it was a price worth paying for that initial 45 minutes, when trumpets and violins added layer upon noirish layer and Staples's whisper hinted at dark things. The words "too many deaths and betrayals, too many lies" float out of the mist on The Flicker of a Little Girl, and sounding like a line from arthouse cinema - apt, given that what the gig lacks is a black-and-white film moodily flickering behind the band. There were surprises, too: E-Type was the official party tune, brass section squawking and Staples rattling maracas with surprising vim, while the Spanish flair of If You're Looking for a Way Out provides a much-needed hit of adrenaline.

My Sister, 1995's remarkable semi-spoken "hit", is saved for the encore, where it reminds us of how very different Tindersticks were from other groups of that era - and of this.

· At Latitude festival on July 20. Box office: 0871 231 0821