Placebo, Academy, Glasgow <!-- none onestar twostar fourstar fivestar -->

A patent cure for teen angst

While Placebo's front man, Brian Molko, may have raised some easy applause midway through the show by taking a dig at the easy-listening talisman James Blunt, he might do well to take a look at his own band before casting stones.

Molko may be a mascara-wearing professed bisexual with a repertoire of songs about androgyny and an eminently rock'n'roll lifestyle, but Placebo's lack of musical adventure places them right in the middle of the alternative road. They write songs for goth teens who confuse adolescent tetchiness with nihilism, and so don't need to stray too far from a mildly edgy commercial formula.

So who's really less credible? Blunt, a blatantly populist recording artist, or Placebo, whose output is also aimed at the heart of the mainstream, yet who dress it in darkness and professional cynicism? Much like the Manic Street Preachers in their early days, you can't help but feel that Placebo mean more to their younger fans for the air of alienation they create, rather than the music they actually produce.

However, credit to Molko and his bandmates, the bassist Stefan Olsdal and the drummer Steven Hewitt; they do have a few undeniably good songs in their repertoire. "Nancy Boy", the one wisely chosen to conclude the set, is an enduringly meaty rock anthem built on a satisfyingly crunching guitar riff, and "Twenty Years" (oddly but heartfeltly dedicated to Gene Pitney) declares the passing of youth in gently affecting style.

"Every Me Every You" may seem to be a lyrically garbled series of word-associations ("Sucker love is known to swing/ Prone to cling and waste these things"), but Molko's sacrifice of meaning for rhyming sound does produce tunefully memorable results. Notably, when confronted with a song of real lyrical weight and design - in this case, Kate Bush's "Running up That Hill", as previously covered on the special edition of Placebo's 2003 album Sleeping with Ghosts - they do a decent job of adapting it to their style.

Where such highs are not achieved, however, the show almost buckles under the weight of its own calculated risquéness. The band's new album Meds, as the title suggests, is piled with references to the seedy hangover of drug abuse, but the songs from it largely express their subject by way of an appropriately melancholy malaise. "Post Blue" talks of "the pills that bring you down" and a "bag of golden brown", but the rather pedestrian song itself relates little of these imagined highs or lows.

Amid a minimal, strobe-flared stage set, Molko and Olsdal appear appropriately larger than life, the diminutive yet asexually handsome Molko throwing crooked-kneed guitar poses, and the stripped-to-the-waist Olsdal saluting the crowd with a simple clenched fist.

They certainly look the part, but only sporadically does their sound even approach the kind of otherworldly rock image they project. With a large proportion of older fans in the house here in Glasgow, seemingly there to relive their angsty mid-Nineties youth, it might even be argued that Placebo's muse is in the sort of post-euphoric hangover state described by their new album.