Amanda Palmer

SPIEGEL GARDEN (VENUE 87)

IT'S NOT hard to see why the audience for Amanda Palmer - singer, songwriter, pianist and half of Boston art-punk duo the Dresden Dolls - includes a sizeable proportion of Edinburgh's young Goth/emo population, complete with matching eyeliner and hair-dye. Herself decked out in a black cutaway gypsy skirt, suspenders and doll-faced make-up, Palmer sings dark, fractured, disturbing songs about dark, fractured, disturbing states of mind, restlessly roaming the mood-swing spectrum from howling anguish to numbed anomie, across subjects including drugs, backstreet abortion and high-school shootings.

Thankfully, she combines these elements with a piercing intelligence, abundant subversive humour and a warmly engaging way with an audience. One minute she's battering hell out of the piano, seemingly laying her soul bare in a confessional stream of tautly crafted, vividly evocative lyrics; the next she's telling us how she (and I quote) "broke a tooth beat-boxing at the Bongo Club" during last year's Edinburgh visit, resulting in a family dinner this time around with the local dentist who'd happened to be in the audience.

Her set-list gives new meaning to the word "diverse", including both Dresden Dolls numbers - the bitingly jaunty Coin-Operated Boy, the skewed honky-tonk of Mandy Goes to Med School - and tracks from Palmer's forthcoming solo album, among them the poignant, menacing Blake Says. Halfway through she introduces "an old standard", which turns out to be a Madonna-meets-Twin-Peaks cover of Material Girl, while a subsequent announcement that, "now I'm going to play the ukulele" - somewhat unexpected in itself - is followed by her not only doing just that, but lip-synching to the Rihanna/Jay-Z hit Under My Umbrella.

Covers of Radiohead's Creep and Death Cab for Cutie's I'll Follow You Into the Dark might seem more in keeping with Palmer's own oeuvre, but in becoming an audience singalong, the former morphs into a celebration, and ukulele accompaniment robs the latter of its unease, leaving only the poignant tenderness.

Palmer's all-round generosity as a performer is further highlighted by several enthusiastic plugs for other Fringe shows she's seen, and reciprocated with cameo appearances from grotesquely costumed members of the Danger Ensemble group, lending yet more winning theatricality to the proceedings.

• Next show, 15 August at 8pm