Kristin Hersh @ King Tut's Wah Wah Hut, 18 May

Intensity is the watchword tonight at King Tut's. The tone is set by opening act Beerjacket (***), the nom de rock of self-effacing singer-songwriter Peter Kelly. His deceptively pretty songs are underpinned by their anxious, fluttering heartbeat of a kick drum, while his near-possessed demeanour emphasises the eerie, offbeat nature of their lyrics. Yet Kelly's needy and awkward stage patter offsets the music's mystique and reveals him to be a talented but gawky work in progress.

By contrast, Kristin Hersh's (****) charm has always been in the way that she inhabits her awkwardness rather than apologising for it. Her paralysing stage fright prevents her from looking at the audience, and in these intimate surroundings it's almost as if we've walked in on her playing guitar alone in her bedroom. The first half of tonight's set is heavy (if such a word can be used to describe such spindly compositions) with her interpretations of Appalachian folk songs; these create the tense and melancholy atmosphere needed for the build towards more kinetic solo highlights such as Your Dirty Answer and, eventually, haunting closer Your Ghost.

But while Hersh's solo work has always been original and affecting, the climax of tonight's performance arrives in the three-song encore that dips into her work with '80s alternative godheads Throwing Muses. It is during quietly charged songs from Hersh's more complex and confrontational era of composition, particularly a stripped-down version of Walking In The Dark from 1988's slept-on classic House Tornado, that the pantomime of tension and release, malevolence and hope, that has been implied the entire night and is at the centre of Hersh's worldview, is played out.