Old Crow Medicine Show started out ten years ago busking on street corners. And to look at the group from Nashville on stage at the Empire, you would think that not much had changed. The five men stood in a line at the front, singing and playing a variety of acoustic instruments - banjo, acoustic and slide guitar, harmonica, fiddle, upright bass. And there was no drummer. But while their songs were steeped in the cadences of folk, country, bluegrass and hillbilly music, and their lyrics informed by the folklore of the old American South, the sound was amplified to rock group levels - unnecessarily so, it seemed at times.

At the end of a British tour to introduce songs from their forthcoming album, Tennessee Pusher, the band were in a bullish mood. They set off at a furious tempo with Fire on the Mountain, a traditional bluegrass tune dating back to the 19th century, led by the nimble fiddle playing of Ketch Secor. With Secor switching to harmonica, they eased into the bluesy Down Home Girl, a song first popularised by the Rolling Stones. Slotted between such favourites were numbers from the new album, produced by Don Was, including the Chuck Berry-influenced Alabama High-Test and a hard-hitting tale of drugs and the damage done called Methamphetamine, co-written by David Rawlings.

The key to the delivery of the songs, whether ancient, borrowed or new, was the superb vocal harmonies of Secor and the guitarist Willie Watson. So instinctive and inseparable was their phrasing that it was as if the two voices were being controlled by the same brain. Returning after an interval, the band rolled out their best-known material, including the traditional CC Rider and Wagon Wheel, a wonderful song famously based on one of Bob Dylan's outtakes. They encored with a hell-for-leather, hoedown version of Woody Guthrie's Union Maid.

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