When Will I Be Famous?

Sometimes, there's nothing more satisfying than self-pity. It's like looking in the mirror after you've been crying and admiring your state of disrepair, or listing your reasons why life is not worth living in front of a sympathetic audience.

Sometimes, there's nothing more satisfying than self-pity. It's like looking in the mirror after you've been crying and admiring your state of disrepair, or listing your reasons why life is not worth living in front of a sympathetic audience.

Ken Low, guitarist and vocalist in White Hotel, was positively wallowing in it, rocking back and forth on his chair and inviting us to share in his psychodrama. Indeed, the world was weighing so heavily on his shoulders, he couldn't even bring himself to stand up.

His distant rumbling tones were sometimes so quiet you had to press your ears against the speakers to hear anything. But, just as you adjusted, discordant shafts of sound snapped through your psyche as if in punishment. For a band struggling to make themselves heard over the bar-room chatter, White Hotel could shake you to the core.

Low, whose cracked and craggy features look as though they could have been carved from the Appalachian mountains, was on sublimely funereal form. Nick Cave - to whom his vocals have justly been compared - seems like a laughing hyena next to him. Think of a more downbeat Tom Waits with a bad case of 'flu. Backed by sparse, twangy guitars, shifty percussion and vocals from ex-Pale Saint Colleen Brown. The overall effect was dreamily depressing, which is a compliment, by the way.

Spain are not so much a new band as woefully overlooked. It's partly the band's fault - it has taken them four years to follow up their debut The Blue Moods Of Spain, with their current LP She Haunts My Dreams. Los Angeles-based singer, Josh Haden, oozed haunted compassion, from the lilting whisper of his voice to the incorrigible sentimentality of his songs.

There was a child-like quality to his performance - he stood utterly still throughout the evening, fresh-faced and doe-eyed, as if he were being propped up by the microphone.

If his lyrics sometimes seemed trite - titles such as "Our Love Is Going To Live Forever" and "It's All Over" could rival Celine Dion on the schmaltz stakes - they are made compelling by his exquisite melodies and lovelorn vocals. If Smog's Bill Callahan were to have a fling with Whitney Houston, he could end up writing songs like these.