ANTHEA MCTEIRNANreviews Girls Aloud at the O _2, TONY CLAYTON LEAreviews Kilkenny Rhythm & Roots Festivaland LAURENCE MACKINreviews Camera Obscura

Girls Aloud

O ₂Dublin

MAYBE THERE’S a supermarket somewhere in Barnsley missing its check-out staff. Maybe the check-out staff got glamorous, got lucky, got together and became the biggest girl band of the millennium. Wait a minute . . . they did.

Well, the story goes something like that. The inner beauty of Girls Aloud is that despite the extreme makeovers and the weight loss, they are everywomen. Even better, they are everywomen we chose by voting for them on ITV's Popstars: The Rivals. Ownership is nine-tenths of the law, after all.

This is a band that knows what the alternatives were for them. This is a band that understands the meaning of payback time every time they take to the stage. These ladies give good show.

And so it was on Saturday when Cheryl, Nadine, Sarah, Nicola and Kimberley rose like sequinned Cinderellas on death-defying hydraulic plinths to deliver their The Promiseto an excited audience high on Haribos and Bacardi Breezers. A rousing injection of pace, courtesy of the cheeky Biology, has a loyal audience on their feet. The ushers race up and down the steps telling girls with fake tan to sit down. "Come on everybody. Get up and dance," hollers Kimberley. Game over. This all-seater gig is now an all-stander.

From the old-skool hit Love Machinethe Girls confidently launch into a selection of new, songs from their latest Out of Controlalbum. Highlight of the show is a performance from a huge swing that glides 70ft over the audience. The staging is everything a pop concert should be and when the girls go gangsta for a segment of the show, the pyrotechnics deserve their own round of applause.

A cover of Womaniseris ebullient, before the Girls underline their status as pop princesses with a medley of their greatest hits – any band that can afford to condense a string of heavy-hitters into a package like this is suffering from an embarrassment of riches. Girls Aloud have truly arrived. As the crowd chant "Ole", Girls Aloud return to The Promise. It's a fairytale ending. ANTHEA MCTEIRNAN

Kilkenny Rhythm & Roots Festival

THE 12TH Kilkenny Rhythm Roots Festival (this year sponsored by Guinness) got off to a terrific start on Friday.

It’s been said before but it bears repeating that the best thing about this small festival with a big heart is the programming of unheard, untried and untested acts this side of the Atlantic. We’re not speaking of Jim White (The Ormonde Hotel, Friday and Saturday), the very alternative country singer whose experimental approach features high levels of strangeness and charm.

Offbeat is the term here, with White evoking the literary narratives of Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy while simultaneously serving up in song and stage presence facets of his own insightful singularity (or as he himself wryly says, “a lot of stories about my own stupidity”).

And we’re not speaking of, effectively, the festival’s resident band, Hillbilly Casino (which played in at least four venues over the weekend), the Nashville rockabilly act that started five years ago gigging for tips and which is now a red hot favourite wherever they perform. Did we say perform?

This bunch – fronted by the constantly backcombing Nic Roulette – surge into your face like a balled-up manifestation of tattoos, energy, sweat and rhythm, covering Johnny Cash and Hank Williams songs, as well as laying down the law with their own brand of face-slapping rock’n’roll.

Subtle? No. Great fun? Yes.

But back to the unheard, untried, untested; say hello to Canadian act Luke Doucet the White Falcon (Cleeres, Friday; Ryan’s, Saturday; Kilford Hotel, Sunday), who are gaining ground in and around North America through their support slots with Blue Rodeo and James Blunt (an unlikely pairing, you’ll agree). Doucet himself is a personable type, all lanky hair, check shirt and good manners, but his music is something else altogether, as it blends a certain literate, post-punk familiarity (Graham Parker, Tom Petty) with fluid, guitar-driven and companionable Americana.

Doucet’s fellow band member and wife, Melissa McClelland (Cleeres, Saturday), is cut from a different mould, with crystal-clear country tunes, Douglas Sirk movie looks and a range of lyrics that don’t hold back on the home truths.

All in all, what we experienced over the weekend was yet another solid programme at what has to be Ireland’s most compact and hospitable music festival, where virtually everything is low-key but high grade. It concludes tonight (Monday, May 4th) with a hoedown come-all-ye at Paris Texas pub, featuring Hillbilly Casino and others.

The walls will, no doubt, drip sweat — you have been warned. TONY CLAYTON LEA

Camera Obscura

Andrews Lane Theatre, Dublin

On record, Camera Obscura drip with sunshine harmonies and rich, bright melodies, bouncing out of the speakers and daring you not to smile. As a live act, you expect a group of excitable individuals crackling around the stage with infectious energy.

This band, though, are no fresh ingenues. For more than a decade, Camera Obscura have been producing polished, intelligent pop that has enjoyed plenty of quiet acclaim without quite setting the world on fire. Equal parts delightful hooks and subtle sophistication, you expect a live band with style and substance who don’t have to flaunt it.

At this gig, though, the sound is muddy and uncertain. With seven members of the band on stage, it is difficult to identify individual melodies. The pristine guitar sounds and delicate shower of synths that shimmer on record here seem somewhat dim, and although it’s a large group of players, they don’t seem to generate an awful lot of noise.

The band will make few enemies with this live show, but they are unlikely to win any new converts. The songs are rolled out with not a lot of evident enthusiasm and the rhythm section (at times, all four of them) rarely steps beyond its toe-tapping pace. There are a few exceptions: My Maudlin Careersounds like a brilliantly nostalgic song remembered from a misspent teenage youth, and French Navyhas the room humming pleasantly (although you can't help but wonder how a song as blissfully infectious on record as this doesn't have the room bouncing).

Without a jolt of urgency and energy, the set and songs have all the unpredictability of a cul-de-sac.

They're nice, like a Marietta biscuit, perhaps with a racy slick of butter – but, live, I'd prefer a chocolate biscuit or maybe even some stinky cheese. LAURENCE MACKIN