The Gourds, Borderline, London

You know the crowd would be dancing if they could, but there's hardly room to shrug your shoulders as the masterful Texan roots alchemists, the Gourds, pay a rare visit to Britain. The band have been unnaturally hemmed in, too, the two-hour show they normally cull from the six hours of material they have stored in their heads is reduced to less than 90 minutes. So we never get to hear their Texan country version of Snoop Dogg's "Gin & Juice", or of Bowie's "Ziggy Stardust", or many of their own fine songs from the five albums that have built their reputation as a latter-day Band, threading together every kind of American music in a way that's organically theirs. What they do play is unpredictable and pleasurable, rooted but with an open mind.

They look like five working-class college boys from a Texan country town, into a little bit of drinking and playing, anytime between 1971 and now, and that can't be too far from the truth. Kevin Russell, a big man in a fisherman's waistcoat, with small, searching eyes and a lazy drawl straight from his one-time home state of Louisiana, leads them. But it's Jimmy Smith, like Russell, one of this democratic band's songwriters, who starts, with a slurring impersonation of the Pogues' Shane MacGowan, before launching into that kindred spirit's long-ago "Waxy's Star". Then, it's fellow-Texan Townes Van Zandt's mysterious romantic lament, "Two Girls", and their own evocation of community and loss, "Ghosts of Hallelujah".

There are country whoops of wishful recognition from this London crowd as obscure Texan placenames are reeled off in the following songs, and you realise the American roots that the Gourds celebrate have stretched to our cold country, too. When they strike up Chuck Berry's "Promised Land", sung by Russell in a Southern mumble that turns its lyrics' sequence of criss-crossed towns and highways into a private language, the general feeling of recognition releases the night's biggest cheer.

There's room, too, for Russell to pause and ponder the world with us over a cigarette, letting the evening breathe, before picking up his mandolin. The Rolling Stones' "Miss You" rounds off a comforting night.