Old Crow Medicine Show must feel as much, if not more, at home playing in Scotland these days as they do back in Tennessee.

Old Crow Medicine Show, Liquid Room, Edinburgh
Star rating ***

Old Crow Medicine Show must feel as much, if not more, at home playing in Scotland these days as they do back in Tennessee. With their audience dutifully yee-hawing every fiddle, harmonica or slide-guitar note of remotely blue-ish hue and throwing its collective cowboy hat in the air to welcome tempo increases and hootenanny choruses, the Liquid Room took on the aspect of a Saturday night cattle drover dust-sluicing stop on the Goodnight-Loving Trail. A teeming balcony and even a brief bout of fisticuffs among fractious trail hands only enhanced the western saloon impression.

All of which slightly flatters the Medicine Show boys because, certainly compared with recent Edinburgh visitors The Wilders and Special Ed and the Shortbus, their acoustic country roots broth sounds a mite thin. Their songs capture authentic topics - hussies who steal a man's heart while finagling his wallet, methamphetamine use and abuse, and the dual gastro-libidinal appeal of downhome barbeques all featured here in tracks from their latest, Don Was-produced album, Tennessee Pusher.

In many ways, they're at their best when at their gentlest, stirring in richer ingredients with a mixture of Hank-esque simplicity and Paul Siebel-like sophistication. But much of their appeal, as Was has noted, lies in their being a rock'n'roll band using fiddles, banjos and acoustic guitars instead of Les Pauls and Marshall stacks. They might need the latter shortly to penetrate audience responses to their shamelessly good-time singalongs Cocaine Habit and Wagon Wheel, because if their two main singers did sing their hearts out, as each proclaimed in introducing the other, then by crikey, they had to.