Gig review: Chrysta Bell, Voodoo Rooms, Edinburgh

Being adopted as David Lynch’s latest muse clearly isn’t a fast-buck career move, however bankable the association might ultimately prove.

Chrysta Bell

Voodoo Rooms, Edinburgh

Star rating: * * *

Inspired as a child by the soundtrack to Lynch’s cult TV series Twin Peaks, Texan-born chanteuse Chrysta Bell spent 13 years working with the movie maverick on her 2011 debut album This Train, while this tour builds on a previously scant smattering of live outings.

After a brief recorded voiceover intro from the great man himself, Bell – accompanied by a three-piece band on guitar/bass, keyboards/electronics and drums, against a backdrop of film projections – opened with the moody, bluesy, waltz-time Real Love, followed by the album’s darkly dreamy, almost devotional title track, straightaway showcasing her striking contralto vocals, simultaneously capable of smouldering and scorching, while elsewhere diminishing to ghostly fragility. There were strong, frequent echoes of both Annie Lennox and Siouxsie Sioux – Bell’s sensuous electro-pop version of Be Bop A Lula could have been an early Eurythmics cover – and also of Kate Bush, in her dramatic stage demeanour and intensely emotive delivery.

The material was liberally suffused with the director’s trademark eerie, otherworldly atmospherics, but decidedly short on memorable melodies, this apparently having been Bell’s primary responsibility in their co-writing partnership. And while her theatrical performance style clearly aspires to Camille O’Sullivan’s electrifying level of audience enthrallment, Bell as yet lacks a sufficiently compelling stage presence.