As you might expect from a transsexual performer, there seem to be several singers dwelling inside Baby Dee. There's the operatic diva, the shy kid who dominates the church choir, the Irish drunk singing to mice in the gutter, the reincarnation of German cabaret artist Lotte Lenya, the mother crooning to her newborn child - not to mention the animal enthusiast who likes imitating dog growls. Dee oscillates fascinatingly between all of them, not just within individual songs but within individual lines of those songs.

It makes for a performance of startling drama, although Dee herself is not dramatic. She is surprisingly coy, in fact, for someone so ready with a dirty joke. She looks, when she first comes on, as though she has arrived straight from a stint felling trees (the job she did between the release of her debut album and this year's set of autobiographical torch songs, Safe Inside the Day): chunky cardigan over dalmatian-spotted hooded top, cropped trousers hovering above heavy black boots. She chats readily with the crowd, but always sounds slightly stilted, as though she is talking under duress.

Essentially, the songs say everything. "Life is bitter and death is sweet," Dee cackles on The Earlie King, a carnival-coloured glimpse at the fairytale monsters of her childhood. "There's a harp in that piano, there's a girl inside that boy," runs The Dance of Diminishing Possibilities, which might have been lifted from The Night of the Hunter's book of nursery rhymes.

Dee herself plays harp and piano, and no matter how heavy-handedly she seems to attack each instrument, the sound she produces is delicately beautiful. Add the sometimes jazzy, sometimes symphonic, sometimes vaudevillian embellishments of her four-piece band, however, and the music grows as complex and thrillingly wayward as Dee herself.

· At the Cube Cinema, Bristol (0870 4444 400), tonight.