As any pop fan who has lived through heartbreak knows, it isn't your friends who enfold and console you in times of trouble, it's music. For how many people has Noah and the Whale's second album, The First Days of Spring, served as a shoulder to cry on since its release last August? Its 12 songs may be rooted in frontman Charlie Fink's misery over a certain break-up (from Laura Marling), but their melancholy sentiments are expressed in a language general enough that they could apply to anyone – even, Fink suggests cheekily when introducing I Have Nothing, England's vanquished footballers.

Still, it is an intimate record, and it sits uncomfortably in Somerset House, not because the imposing courtyard is too impersonal, but because every effort is made to put on a Proper Rock Show, and that energy feels misplaced. Lights flash, the band headbang enthusiastically, Blue Skies and My Broken Heart explode like a fireworks display, and all these ardent exertions result in a lacklustre sound that plods where it hopes to soar. It's only when they play The First Days of Spring, near the show's end, that everything comes together: building from dense drums and desolate violin to a shattering crescendo, it is gripping.

It's the quieter, fragile moments that work best: a slow rendition of Mary, from their first album, that is soft as down, or Our Window, whose slanted guitar notes are suspended in stillness and hush. As Fink sings of staring at the stars, we can look up and see the sky turn dove-grey: it's not the exposure to a wide-open space that undoes this show, but the band's – and the lighting designer's – over-emphatic performance.