Concert review: Erin McKeown is elegant and eclectic at Tin Angel

With each album since 1999's

Monday Morning Cold

, Erin McKeown has crafted folk music with a twist. Her genre-jumping sounds increasingly have been enriched by country swing, Dixieland, conjunto, and bossa nova arrangements. And on 2013's

Manifestra

, her smartly lyrical songs had new, stronger political content.

McKeown's is an elegant yet aggressive conversational voice, with a passion and poise that truly stood out during her packed-tight night at the Tin Angel on Friday.

Alone on stage, jumping from electric guitar to piano, McKeown was a friendly force.

Bobbing her head - and high bouffant/pompadour/ponytail - she painstakingly pronounced each coolly emotive word in the slow, steady "To a Hammer," as though her message of love's balancing act was a chat around a kitchen table rather than a gig.

In the grungy pop of "Cinematic" and a deeply blue "The Jailer," she continued that clearly enunciated lead, almost as though she were staging a recitation of Noel Coward's "Mad Dogs and Englishmen."

At the electric piano for the Orleans parish shuffle of "That's Just What Happened," she shifted to a sound far more soulful, imbued with the power of the divine. "I asked God to meet me in New Orleans," she sang, talking up saints and waters-into-wines before the quick aside of "Don't be scared, Philly; I have not found religion."

McKeown covered "the full range of relationship" dramas - sex and civility and tenderness - with the sultriest of voices and genially ribald lyrics ("touch my landing strip"). Her set had an exquisitely open airiness, rich and pastoral for being so stripped down.

The gently naughty "Sugar in the Pie" and the sweet foodie sentiments of "Rhode Island is Famous for You" ("Peaches come from Georgia," "old whiskey comes from old Kentucky") found McKeown swinging to Californian jazz à la Wes Montgomery before hitting on the dozy "Blackbirds" and its "Sing a Song of Sixpence" classicism.

Near the finale, McKeown offered the night's most interactive and inclusive tune, "Histories." As the song conveyed its message of the personal and the political, crowd and performer became one with just a few handclaps and deeply felt emotions on both ends of the room.