NINA Nastasia evokes a weeping landscape with her trinket-strewn ditties and has a new album out next Monday.

Nastasia's haunting voice is as grey as a thunderstorm on a sandy beach while half-recalled memories, an unflinching mortality and a weary wisdom enrich her music. Her band plays like the Eliza Carthy group and Velvet Underground married in darkest urban woods with added smashing of gongs.

The latter-day American folk music crashes with a similar deathly sense that pervades early Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds with the sounds of a length of heavy rope whipping the ground.

The brutal sea shanties, waltzes and ballads take you down to taste the salt water, the metal of the jib and the listen to the bitter experiences in an ageing civilisation. Run to Ruin is out on Monday, June 2, followed by a UK tour which calls on Bristol's Seymour Family Club, on Wednesday, June 25.

It's the third album by the grim faced/angel-voiced singer-songwriter from New York. Her debut Dogs is long lost but her second album The Blackened Air won her a sizeable following in the UK.

Appearances at All Tomor-row's Parties followed and even a pew at John Peel's birthday party on the farm - At Peel Acres.

The singer bends in gales and does not wilt in the midday sun. The intensity of Run to Ruin and Blackened Air are both empowering records as Nastasia steers from joy to grief, deftly and directly.

Her concert in the West Country next month is her first outside of London and the north and comes highly recommended.

Nina Nastasia plays Seymour's Family Club in Old Market Bristol, on Wednesday, June 25. Old Market is the area of Bristol close to the docks studded in houses of ill-repute!