With more facial hair on show than at a Gillette convention, shaving obviously isn't the order of the day as far as Richard Swift and his accompanying band members are concerned. Not that we care, of course, particularly when the opening 'Lady Day' transfixes the room in a thirty-minute long spell, Swift fleeting between piano, electronic keyboard and vocoder while the rest of his band - bassist Elijah Thomson the most notable exception - move casually betwixt and during each number of his ten-song set.

What's even more enrapturing about Swift is the way he flits from Grandaddy/Mercury Rev-esque flutterings to Adam Green-style folky blues before the odd big ballad emerges to split both the running order and tempo in two. No two songs sound the same, which makes him both an exciting and enticing live artist. Most baffling of all, though, is why after two albums - admittedly both released as low-key affairs on the lavish Secretly Canadian label - and five years of playing live all over the US he's only just starting to get some recognition. Whatever the reason, his talents won't remain undiscovered for much longer, and you can bet your top, middle and bottom dollars on that.

My Morning Jacket are one of those strange anomalies whose efforts on record have often left me bewildered, bemused and slightly bored. And yet, like a limpet to a grazed cliff, sticking with them all the way hasn't just been an option but a necessity, as there has always been a distinct feeling that, somewhere, a potentially great band is waiting to emerge from its studio humdrum.

Well folks, that somewhere is most definitely on a stage - any stage - because the little lost lambs from nowheresville ranch, Kentucky, that permeate through both It Still Moves and Z have grown balls, big hairy ones. They've puffed out their chests and set about turning themselves into the missing link between Lynyrd Skynyrd's hometown blues rock and My Bloody Valentine's country feedbackin' cousins.

Which means that the likes of 'One Big Holiday' - admittedly their pièce de résistance on vinyl - and 'Wordless Chorus' become supernova-sized behemoths of an outergalactic kind. That's not to say they completely dismiss their roots, of course - how could they, with Jim James' southern drawl punctuating every verse? What makes them a more attractive proposition live, though, is the almost telepathic interplay between James and fellow guitarist Johnny Quaid that causes many a head to shake and eye to close in overwhelmed adulation. There's the odd shriek: "Oh my God! It's just look watching Slowdive without the choirboy bits in the middle!"

As the saying goes, it doesn't get much better than that.