Cowboy Junkies, Royal Festival Hall, London

Margo Timmins started out as a painfully shy performer, sitting with her back to the audience. Now, the sultry singer launches into monologues which range from the royal family to the scope of their fanbase.

Margo Timmins started out as a painfully shy performer, sitting with her back to the audience. Now, the sultry singer launches into monologues which range from the royal family to the scope of their fanbase.

"We have a young fan here called Lauren and she's six years old," she intoned with that gorgeous, lilting voice. After dedicating the bittersweet "Sun Comes Up, It's Tuesday Morning" from 1990's The Caution Horses (a prominent album this evening) to Lauren, Margo confessed to her: "Sorry Lauren, but every one of our songs is about heartache and misery."

And they are. To a backdrop of lethargic tempos and curled chords, the Canadian country-rock outfit mine the pain and desolation of small-town America. Their songwriter, Michael Timmins, pens murky, ethereal opuses which speak of the strum of a guitar echoing in a boxcar, cotton fields, forsaken Edward Hopper-like portraits, lost dreams, broken promises, Wild Turkey and dancing despairingly in the moonbeams. Their musical influences are Hank Williams, Neil Young and the Velvets. Their literary equivalents are Carson McCullers and John Updike.

They began, rather wilfully, with the obscure track "Lost My Driving Wheel", a suitably atmospheric and haunting lament which established a feeling of intimacy. The piercing "Where Are You Tonight?" kept the tone assiduously melancholic: "this is not my prince to grant all my wishes/ just another lonely country-boy grown weary of the night/ just another boy with a sink full of dirty dishes."

One More Soul, the Junkies' latest album, is arguably their most accessible to date and they delved into it frequently. But there was a slightly disappointing edge to them tonight. They appeared to be slightly weary (Margo referred more than once to the arduous tour), and there was also the perpetual use of the screeching accordion on songs where it simply wasn't needed. Most vitally, there was a dearth of tracks from their elegiac masterpiece, The Trinity Session, the album they knocked out in 14 hours, with one microphone, in a church in Toronto.

Okay, they did their dreamy version of Lou Reed's "Sweet Jane" and their inspired reinterpretation of "Blue Moon". And we got an uptempo, blues version of "I Don't Get It". But, despite plaintive cries from the audience, there was no "Misguided Angel", their most memorable track. Ultimately, though, Margo's detached and airy vocals are still wondrous, and the better moments of the One Soul Now material hint at treasures to come.