"Anyone else weird out there?" John McCauley, the driving force behind Rhode Island's most party-hearty purveyors of roadhouse rock'n'roll, claims to be suffering the destabilising effects of sleep deprivation. His voice does sound even raspier than usual, a traumatised croak that adds a lived-in, caustic edge to Deer Tick's ramshackle racket.

This is a band with a gift for evoking rock's recent and more far-flung past: last year, as "Deervana", they performed Nirvana's In Utero in its entirety in an uncanny act of tribute. Live, the five-piece can also seem like the Coral tackling Springsteen. After a measured start, this sold-out gig begins to spark when they play a cover of Buddy Holly's Oh Boy, a joyous freakout that segues into Let's All Go to the Bar, perhaps Deer Tick's most immediate drinking song, and certainly the one with the most easily memorised singalong.

Their recent fifth album, Negativity, sounds like a downer but McCauley is in the middle of a literalised honeymoon period. He married singer/songwriter Vanessa Carlton last month in a ceremony officiated by Stevie Nicks, and his wife joins him onstage for In Our Time, a honky-tonk duet about the friction between long-term partners that evokes the alluring push-pull of Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris. "Give her a kiss!" shouts a heckler, and the newlyweds shyly oblige.

After the sweet, sexy Miss K – a poppy, harmonised shuffle about runaway lovers – McCauley begins the wrenching Smith Hill by himself, pre-emptively undercutting its emotional nakedness by introducing it with a resonant burp. Thankfully, Deer Tick can groove as well as they goof: they close with an extended version of Mange that sounds like the Allman Brothers Band meets early Aerosmith, a hypnotic, initially unhurried jam that eventually kicks into frenzied double-time.