Josh Rouse @ Manchester Academy 3, 26 Apr

There's something ever so slightly amiss as Josh Rouse takes to the stage at Academy 3. Maybe it’s the sunglasses, which don’t come off for the entire show. Maybe it’s the fact that the last time we saw him in Manchester he was downstairs in the Academy 2, which has almost twice the capacity. Maybe it’s the air of faded Vegas grandeur about the man himself, a certain Luke Perry-ness, as if he suspects his best years might now be behind him. Maybe it’s the odd smile that lingers on his lips as he performs songs from his new album Love in the Modern Age, as if the more muzak-y elements are a joke that his audience have yet to pick up on.

Whatever it is, it takes five or six songs for him and and his band to get into the flow of things, to slip free of the yoke of the new album (which is perfectly decent and yet seemingly at odds with the rest of his material) and start to relax into the warm embrace of crowd pleasers like It’s the Night Time and 1972 from the 2003 album of the same name. We get a story, introduced by Rouse but told by the drummer, of a night in Minneapolis when a rumour went round the club they were playing that Prince had a special partition created to watch the show; they frantically changed the setlist to “all their sexiest songs” only for the support band to overrun and Prince to leave the building. Some things are not meant to be.

Dressed Up Like Nebraska aside (a song from his debut and “20 years old this month” we’re told, delivered in muted fashion), Rouse hits his stride with a mixture of old and new – we get Women and the Wind from the new album and then solid Rouse hits in the form of Directions (from 2000’s Home) plus My Love Has Gone and Winter in the Hamptons (from 2005’s Nashville). A short encore comprising Sad Eyes (which begins with solo Rouse and hits full band midway prompting a member of the audience nearby to coo, “I’ve never heard this done as it should be!”) and – possibly at the request of another member of the audience – Love Vibration gives everyone just about everything they want if the volume of the singalong is anything to go by.