Come hither, she tempts, but beware

"Come cut me open," sang St. Vincent's Annie Clark at the start of her sold-out Union Transfer show Wednesday night.

Like many of her songs, "Surgeon," from her third album, Strange Mercy, is both a come-on and a threat, inviting her listeners to get in close but warning them they might not like what they see.

Over the course of three albums, Clark - a solo artist in all but (stage) name - has constructed a world at once seductive and forbidding, a fairy-tale thicket containing hidden wonders and corners where the light has never shined. In "Chloe in the Afternoon," she played a woman craving the lashes of a "black horsehair whip," but her snarling guitar lines suggested she's more dominant than submissive. The song takes its title from one of filmmaker Eric Rohmer's "moral tales," but she quipped to the audience, "I hope it's not too moral."

Clark, who was a well-traveled sidewoman before she stepped out on her own, is a dazzling guitarist; at times, her fingers moved over the fretboard so fast they barely seemed to touch the strings. "Save Me From What I Want" pitted snatches of discordant, disjunctive guitar against her pure and fluid voice, reaching upward as if trying to escape from the roiling muck below. Her backing band, made up of drums and paired synths and supplemented with preprogammed loops, generated plenty of free-floating dread, keeping pace with Clark's spooky stop-starts.

Sometimes, Clark's technical command worked against her. There's an overworked quality to her albums that's alleviated only slightly by the messiness of live performance. She slipped into and out of form-fitting personas with each new song, but offered only fleeting glimpses behind the mask.

Tellingly, she cut loose with greatest abandon on the only song she didn't write, the Pop Group's "She Is Beyond Good and Evil." As her band settled into a rare groove, Clark stepped back from the microphone and unleashed a jagged torrent of guitar overtones, chiming and stuttering and crashing into one another.

It was like being caught up in a whirlwind of shattered glass, savoring its splintered beauty as your flesh is cut to shreds. The surgeon's knife cuts more cleanly, but not so deep.