Jennifer Niceley

So far outside the Nashville zeitgeist (redneck glam, Starbucks Americana and the inevitable backlash from bratty punk popsters), Jennifer Niceley may as well get it over with and move to SoHo, where her sonic gallery -- jazzy gestures, reverb blurs (courtesy of guitarist/producer Joe McMahan) and languid acoustic strokes -- would hang well with bohemians who consider Mazzy Star and the Cowboy Junkies the apotheosis of mood music. On her first and only release, Seven Songs, Niceley lives up to her name, then disowns it entirely. A gothic innocence slurs her temperate, delicately pitched voice, and a cool sexuality tingles between her lines like moonlight through magnolia trees. Her Southern melancholia isn't a put-on; it's a turn-on, if your dream belle is secretive-bordering-on-mystifying, intense-bordering-on-obsessive, literate-bordering-on-worldly. Any singer-songwriter knowing enough to cop a metaphor from Yeats' "Second Coming" or release all the dark sensuality of Jesse Winchester's "Biloxi" isn't easily forgotten.

Show starts at 9 p.m. Call 314-351-5711 for ticket price and more information.