Mark Lanegan @ The Liquid Room, Edinburgh, 4 Dec

To see Mark Lanegan is to realise that this is a man who was born ninety years too late. The Seattle singer was born to be a blues man; the type of gritty roadbound figure whose wife has left him; whose best friend has shot himself and whose dog has been run over. In Mark Lanegan’s world it's not only raining but the rain is black and probably acidic too.

“Give us a smile,” yells a crowd member a few songs into tonight’s set. Lanegan does not smile. Lanegan has the demeanour of a man who does not smile often and especially not when instructed to do so by cheeky audience members. Nonetheless he’s a masterful presence with a surprisingly diverse back catalogue. First though, it's up to compadre Duke Garwood to take the stage, with his battered looking guitar wrenching out bluesy licks and wailing feedback.

Bathed in blue light, he announces he needs to tune his “piece of crap” guitar, before lunging into a swaying hypnotic blues like early Led Zeppelin or something from Nick Cave’s Murder Ballads. Standing alone on stage, the rogue’s gallery of devils and dealers that pack out his songs sadly can’t silence a chatty crowd, though he does manage to produce a handful of swampy, melancholic highlights. Disco Lights is as far from the Bee Gees as possible, and looks as if it’s almost painful for Garwood to play as he conjures the sweeping swampy blues of the early pioneers.

There seems equally little chance of levity as our headliner limps up to the microphone. Armed with a voice that sounds like Lemmy and Johnny Cash after finishing off a bottle of whisky, Mark Lanegan has had an eventful three decades in the music business, releasing minor grunge classics as part of Screaming Trees, joining Queens of the Stone Age and releasing a series of duet albums with Belle & Sebastian’s Isobel Campbell.

Opening with Death’s Head Tattoo from this year’s Gargoyle, and the gothic drama of Gravedigger’s Song, he glowers from behind a pair of dark glasses that he takes a solid third of the set to remove. Even between songs he doesn’t talk much and tends to greet instrumental breaks in his songs with a furrowed brow, only once briefly applauding a solo from his guitar player. At this the axe man lets out a sigh of relief but is quick to move on as if he fears his bandleader’s opprobrium should he be tempted to showboat.

Tracks from 2012’s Blues Funeral – the weird and brilliant fusion of blues, psychedelia and electronica that Lanegan penned after listening to “too much Kraftwerk” – feature heavily in the setlist, with the rattling Bleeding Muddy Water and a reworked Harborview Hospital showing off his voice at its roughest and most characterful.

Backed by a solid band, Lanegan slips between genres and eras with ease, keeping the whole project locked down with his gravelly tones. He’s lived quite a life and he’s not afraid to stare unflinchingly at his own mistakes. As the audience cheer and Lanegan slowly departs the stage, he pauses just long enough to put on the sunglasses he had earlier discarded. The show is over but for Mark Lanegan the road stretches on.