You might think Marissa Nadler looks sweet, and on record she certainly sounds sweet - but that's how she gets you. She has the long hair, oval face and wafting black dress of the paramour in an Edward Gorey cartoon, but she is heiress to a purer, more unsettling strand of American gothic. The dead and the otherwise departed populate these stark, rippling songs. Between them, however, she is disconcertingly chirpy: "I exclusively write about heartbreak," she announces before Diamond Heart. "I know that may sound burdensome ..." Then, with the gleeful enthusiasm of a Munster child: "This is the most heartbreaking song I've written to date!"

Diamond Heart is a more inward, more paranoid cousin to the Judy Collins song My Father, a song later taken to further emotional extremes by Nina Simone. When Nadler sings, extraordinarily, of having "reliquary eyes", the image proves unshakeable.

On record her voice is haunting, but gentle and mellifluous. Live and solo, it is often intoxicatingly forceful, even harsh. A much less prissy Joan Baez and Tarnation's Paula Frazer at her most spooked both come to mind. Mexican Summer, a lovely Tim Buckley-ish strum, is lifted heavenwards by keening high notes that touch tingly places usually only reached by Liz Fraser.

If some of these references make Nadler seem something of a hippy throwback, she isn't; she's more clever than she seems. A deceptively simple song about real-life, vaudeville-era conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton makes them seem brave rather than freakish. A song partly about the death of Sylvia Plath that might easily become maudlin is dismissed as "silly" by its own lyric. Somehow, in this unnaturally balmy May, there is something thrillingly bleak about Nadler's repeated assertion that "the summer of love is over".