Shack

I can still remember the moment I fell in love with the music of Mick and John Head. Sitting on a rock, on the coast of Brittany on a disappointingly grim day four summers ago, with two barely listened-to cassette copies of 'The Magical World Of The Stands' and 'HMS Fable' that someone had given me. Black clouds gathering in the sky, the wind whipping the sand up across the beach, waves lashing against the shore, and a song on my Walkman that seemed to dovetail so perfectly with the scene in front of me that it felt as this was the way this music had always been meant to be heard. It wasn't until a couple of plays later that I realised it was about trying to score smack. By then it didn't matter what it was about.

The song in question was 'Streets Of Kenny', to these ears still the most wonderful thing Mick Head has produced in two decades with The Pale Fountains, The Strands and now Shack. It sounded monumental then, and it sounds monumental tonight, in a dark and overheated room in the ICA, four years on and heaving under the weight of expectation surrounding the new Shack opus. Played about five songs into their set, it towers majestically above everything that's gone before. It's hard to think of a rock released since that explores peaks and troughs so perfectly - the way it swells to such magnificent crescendos then calms again, sounding huge and expansive without the slightest hint of padding or superficial bombast. Meanwhile, John Head's brilliantly truncated guitar solos manage to sound both raucous and folksy at the same time, like Jonny Greenwood confined to a tiny island off the coast of Galway. It sounds elemental. Even in this sweltering, airless room.

Because until that moment, they'd got me worried. For all the timeless magic of so much of their music, Shack have never felt like a band you could truly rely on. From the moment when they step on and launch into 'Strangers', from 1991's 'Waterpistol' LP, through a clutch of songs from the new album, 'Here’s Tom With The Weather', right up to the opening notes of 'Streets Of Kenny', there is the nagging worry you might have unfortunately stumbled into one of their famously mediocre live sets.

An hour later, by the time their cover of Love's 'House Is Not A Motel' has reached its sublime conclusion, all such doubts are dispelled. Shack were awesome tonight. They were just taking their time. It's ostensibly a showcase gig for their new material, finally released next month, but although the new stuff sounds intriguing - a return to the more pastoral, Nick Drake-esque territory of 'The Magical World Of The Strands' - it's scuppered by a persistently screeching sound desk and bass that wouldn't shame an Aphrodite set. We'll have to wait a little longer to succumb to its undoubted charms.

Instead, tonight's real highlight's lie in reassuringly well-trodden paths - a disappointingly slow version of 'Cornish Town' notwithstanding. 'Undecided', 'Queen Mathilda', 'Something Like You' and a spectacular 'Comedy' have lost none of their glory in the last few years, and when they play 'X Hits The Spot', Mick no longer feels the need to substitute 'X' with 'smack'. Good for him.

Even the fuckups are entertaining - it's great to hear 'London Town' again, despite Mick's description of tonight’s version as "a bit ropey", and it's endearing to see that even four years on, he still forgets the words to 'Pull Together'. It doesn't matter - the song itself is still anthemic, and like so much of Shack's music, manages to finely balance its tales of skag-addled inner-city deprivation with an air of something far more timeless and rustic and transcendent - the bottom of the Coach and Horses steps and Cornish coast, both at the same time.

Onstage, Mick himself is an enduring presence - every time he catches a glimpse of his audience his whole body seems to exclaim "wow! I can't believe youse are all here, listening to us!" You'd be hard-pressed to find a less-contrived band out there - at any other time you'd have trouble differentiating between the four blokes onstage and the rest of the overwhelmingly male, thirty-something audience cheerfully hollering requests for Pale Fountains tracks. Tonight it all just adds to the charm, like we're all mates here - they just happen to make some astonishing music. Long may it continue.