33-year-old Bostonian Marissa Nadler has a voice that drives critics to poetic acts of self-sacrifice. "A voice you would follow straight into Hades," wrote one. "In mythological times it could have lured men to their deaths at sea," said another. The critical community would collectively bungee into Krakatoa, it would seem, at the bidding of this will-o'-the-wisp of a trill, equal parts Hope Sandoval, Kate Bush, Lanterns on the Lake and an undead Lana Del Rey.

Fluffing her hair, retuning her guitar or fiddling with her red dress, Nadler speaks little between songs as if to heighten the impact of her most devastating weapon. Because when she sings, she utterly enchants. Backed by a harmonising duo on cello and violin, these are Lynchian torch songs, lovers' laments and suicide ballads oozing American gothic and LA noir, drenched in images of blood, decay and spectral semi-existences. "I'm a ghost when you're away," she coos during the haunted hula of Firecrackers; "I lost a year stumbling from room to room hoping that I'd wake up somehow next to you," she coldly reflects on Was It a Dream, a standout from this year's seventh official album July, which approximates the record's sonorous lagoon-rock textures with a burst of electrified strop midway through. Evocative and beguiling, Nadler sings her sparse elegies for dead cities, errant partners and bristling regret with a stoic desperation, as if stroking her supressed demons to sleep.

Her brave face, however, makes her gently drawn anguishes all the more powerful. An ominous ballad that opens "I hardly think about you anymore" is never going to be called I'm Totally Over It Thanks, Stop Texting Me, but the bitterness and resentment that she crams into the passive-aggressive bottle of Anyone Else and corks tight – "I look at the time spent wasted on you, what a lie you were living" – has her rocking back and forth with her back to the crowd by the end. Truly bewitching, and the last one to hell buys the Savlon.