Guillemots, Somerset House, London

Just two years ago, before all the award nominations, before Paul McCartney started giving them favourable notices, when Guillemots were still stuck doing the rounds of the capital's fringe venues, front-man Fyfe Dangerfield was self-evidently a star in the making.

No one with a name so improbable would have made it from there to the Somerset House series without the charisma to match. Even surrounded by banks of keyboards, as he is for most of this show, Dangerfield is a compelling presence, his shaggy mane of hair bobbing this way and that and lending him a more than passing resemblance to Abbey Road-era McCartney.

Like most of the other acts performing in this year's series - Lily Allen, Mika, Hot Chip - Guillemots are young, British (almost), and play exuberant, joyful music that defies the gloom of the nation's front pages.

All the songs on their debut album, Through the Windowpane, sound like love songs. To girls, to fans, to the world at large, to the birds - redwings, flycatchers, curlews and, of course, guillemots - that are name-checked at every available opportunity.

Dangerfield is joined in his mission by three equally motley fellow travellers: comely Canadian double bassist Aristazabal Hawkes, formerly a jazz player; Brazilian guitarist MC Lord Magrão (aka Ricardo Bambine), formerly a committed metal-head; and Greig Stewart, the rather less exotic Scot responsible for their effervescent drum parts.

Their disparate range of influences is one of Guillemots great strengths; marrying jazz-inflected rhythms to contagious pop songs, they are always more than the sum of their parts. Despite its many charms, their radio-friendly LP barely begins to do justice to the sense of musical adventure Guillemots display in performance. The soundscapes they traverse in their live show are often a world away from the pop charts.

Bambine, in particular, is a more telling influence on the band's live sound, teasing music out of megaphones and typewriters, or shadowboxing a theremin, making sounds that, along with Stewart's disjointed rhythms, take album opener "Little Bear" into unfamiliar territory. The guitarist contributes one of his own songs to the set: "She's Evil", an industrial rocker that sounds rather more like Nine Inch Nails than The Beatles, and sees Hawkes rearing her head with a maniacal stage laugh.

But this alienating interlude segues into a bouncy rendition of crowd-pleaser "Annie, Let's Not Wait", and from there into Dangerfield's virtuosic solo rendition of another single, "We're Here."

It's still romance that hangs heaviest in the air at the show's end, on the monumental "Sao Paolo". Perhaps it's the lingering effect of one particular love song, the lovely "Made Up Love Song no. 43", before which Dangerfield reads a marriage proposal from one audience member to another. Judging by the cheers, the lady must have said yes.