He may look like a dark angel and sing like a honey-voiced troubadour.

But Rufus Wainwright has recently spent time in the very unpretty world of crystal meth addiction, "gay hell" and rehab.

New album Want One, the first part of a double release, is the product of his descent into the underworld.

Harsher than his previous heady, opulent offerings, it takes the hallmark Wainwright orchestral arrangements of cabaret and opera-influenced lush pop and takes them to a much darker - but still stylistically Wainwrightian - place.

The very modern disasters that afflict him - strangers picked up on the internet, unrewarding sex, drugs and partying way too hard - are filtered through his particular Gothic perspective to emerge as songs enriched by myths and legends.

On the album cover, Wainwright is depicted as a pre-Raphelite knight holding a rose, lost in a dark forest. Translating his hedonistic excesses into a mythical journey, Wainwright admits that his sense of romantic adventure pervades his work.

"In the present world, this technological, psychotic, politicised, nonsensical world, you have to believe that the good guys are going to win," he says.

"That evil will be banished somehow!"

The son of Canadian folk singers Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III, Wainwright has probably been genetically programmed for a career in music - as has his sister Martha, who will be supporting him.

Though his style is aesthetically bombastic, his work is saved from pretentiousness by his wit and honesty.

Both Rufus and Martha had the audience cooing in appreciation last time they appeared at The Dome, when they took part in an evening of Leonard Cohen songs.

This second double dose of Wainwrights should slip down like a spoonful of molasses.

*Starts 8pm, tickets cost £17.50/£15. Call 01273 709709.