Nastasia’s spare yet compelling sounds

Context can be funny. Singer-songwriter Nina Nastasia’s albums type her as an acoustic, American chamber-music cousin of P.J. Harvey for the songs’ dark hues and emotional depths -- a comparison made even readier by the fact that her producer is Steve Albini, who also worked with Harvey.

At Spaceland on Saturday, playing the same intricate music from her two most recent albums, “Blackened Air” and the new “Run to Ruin,” she seemed more like a renegade member of the Carter Family, though one fond of Schubert lieder. Her distinctive brand of Appalachian-ish art song is equally compatible with both Gillian Welch and Tom Waits.

The fact is, Nastasia is a city girl, raised in Los Angeles and now living in New York. But Saturday she seemed to walk through lonely hills in a quiet search of redemption. In part the impression came from her unassuming manner, and in part from her five-man band, looking like Ozark or Eastern European refugees while hauntingly complementing Nastasia’s finger-picked guitar with a decidedly non-rock lineup of viola, cello, accordion, string bass and drums. Dylan Willemsa’s viola gave the music a particularly heartbroken edge recalling sorrowful Transylvanian folk music.

Significantly, her low-key but pleasant presence brought extra mystery to such spare, sketchy songs as “You, Her and Me,” with its repressed despair and unspecific details. Is “her” a rival? A child? An elderly mother? Is Nastasia a short-story writer or a diarist?

She revealed little Saturday, which made her remarkable art even more compelling.