Live music review: Marissa Nadler

Button Factory, Dublin

Marissa Nadler’s music drifts somewhere between Lana Del Rey b-side and Emily Dickinson poem. Looking like a refugee from a Southern Gothic novel, she has striking shoulder length hair and wears a vivid red dress of the sort that tends to feature as a plot device in David Lynch movies. Without singing a note, she has already cast a spell.

Musically, Nadler, a Massachusetts native based in Washington DC, proceeds from sad and lulling chamber pop to cranked-up melancholia. Her voice is gauzy and cooing — at moments she is a dead ringer for Mazzy Star’s Hope Sandoval — but her songs have a razor-blade heart. Juxtaposing calming melodies with dark lyrics is one of pop’s older tricks, but she pulls it off better than most.