Elbow Goes the Distance While South Meanders

“Has anyone had as nice a day as we have?” asked Guy Garvey, the endearing, rumpled singer of the young English band Elbow, from the Troubadour stage on Tuesday. “I doubt it.”

That kind of genuine, naive charm was the Manchester quintet’s secret weapon Tuesday, a winning setup for the blindside sock of its musical creativity and emotional depth.

Think of Elbow as Radiohead with puppy-dog cuddliness rather than distancing wariness. And indeed, Elbow’s music worked some of the same Beatles-meet-Pink Floyd aesthetic as Radiohead. From the cathedral-like musical structures of “Any Day Now” to the pained vulnerability of the closing “Newborn,” building from a yearning solitude to intense catharsis, the band fully fleshed out the atmospheric potential of its impressive debut album, “Asleep in the Back.”

If Garvey’s friendly manner made it hard to imagine Elbow commanding a larger setting than this small club, the dynamics of the music and performance made it hard to imagine the band’s not doing so.

Fellow U.K. act South, sharing the bill on both bands’ first proper U.S. tour, arrived with a big buzz, its hybrid of guitar-based Anglo-rock and electronica-derived patterns developed under the tutelage of producer and Mo’Wax label head James Lavelle. On the album “From Here on In,” it makes for seductive, if inconsequential atmospheres, evoking Stone Roses via Oasis, the latter particularly in Joel Cadbury’s voice and melodies.

Live, the music had more dimension, thanks to the hard-hitting attack of drummer Bret Shaw, which is underplayed on the album. But often the elements failed to gel, and neither the rock nor electronica was strong enough to carry the set. Ironically, the best moments were those when South threw off the techno-like structures and played more freely, notably on the extended “Sight of Me,” charged with brooding, Stone Roses-like neo-psychedelia.