"I may not have any tits, but I've got quite a nice ass," Beth Orton blithely announced between songs this evening, standing sheepishly in a snug Snoopy T-shirt that made both points perfectly clear, acknowledging with a grin the adulation of the audience and the laughter of her bandmates. "Well, I've got to think of things to say while they're tuning up," she added apologetically. "And sometimes I just can't think of anything."

With this statement, Orton summed up the whole of her musical existence, throwing both flaws and virtues into sharp relief against a backdrop of "if I couldn't laugh I'd be crying" melancholy. Orton is on tour with her original Trailer Park-era six-piece band, stacking this evening's setlist heavily with songs from her forthcoming Daybreaker. Orton's shtick can best be described as the bleeding edge of U.K.-based acoustica, marrying delicately strummed guitars to click-track-precise beats in support of the following persistent lyrical themes:

1. I am alone in this world.

2. You are, too.

3. Doesn't that make us alone? Together? How lonely.

Orton's new material continues her quest to infuse these rather narrow premises with as much depth and breadth as possible, using Billie Holiday's harrowing, ultrapersonal blues as a base upon which to build a sandcastle monument to the burden of dysphoria and the Sisyphean bravery of perseverance in the face of endless loss. New tracks such as "Anywhere," "Thinking About Tomorrow" and the particularly lovely "Mt. Washington" (with Orton clamping her eyes shut during its chanted, mantra-like mid-section: "Bring it on, bring it on") emphasize the airy spaces between the beats, where echoey, warped notes hang in the air like wisps of smoke as Orton performs a highwire act balancing Björk's effortlessly soaring voice against Joni Mitchell's downbeat jazz and Patti Smith's poetic declarations of independence.

Orton knows of what she sings: She lost both parents at a relatively young age, and her mother, in particular, continues to surface as an ongoing character in her work, speaking to her as a ghost on Central Reservation's "Pass In Time" while her band's feather-light touch elevated the otherwise somber tune to a fluid, improvisational prayer. What was perhaps most noteworthy tonight was the ease with which Orton's band expanded upon her original material. In its empathic hands, "Someone's Daughter" emerged as more ethereal and psychedelic than the original, fixating on a Velvets-like extended jam around a single chord; the sable, ornate qualities of "Blood Red River" morphed into a kind of circular-math R&B; and the delicately rendered "She Cries Your Name" veered sharply toward the kind of clubland techno Orton has contributed to other people's records (the Chemical Brothers and William Orbit, to name the two most obvious sources), with keyboardist Sean Reed and stand-up bassist Ali Friend applying their elbows to various funky filigrees sprinkled over the beat-provided anchor.

"We love you, Beth!" yelled one particularly zealous fan before Orton launched into "God's Song," one of her new record's more memorable numbers. "Well, fuckin' right!" Orton shot right back, relishing her return to live performance and the joy of exploring what her new songs sound like when entrusted to her long-time musical collaborators. One suspects that, societally speaking, Orton's new record of smart, shimmying sadness has come along at precisely the right time to salve our collective psychic wounds.

—Corey duBrowa