Martha Wainwright: Martha Wainwright

Herald rating: * * * *

The mouthy daughter of folker Kate McGarrigle and cynic-songwriter Loudon Wainwright, and sister of pop-dramatist Rufus, arrives with brutal honesty.

This Wainwright - and there are others - has taken her time. She spent years opening for and singing backup with her famously gay brother Rufus, and her divorced parents Loudon W and Kate McGarrigle; appeared on albums by Linda Thompson; and impressed at a Leonard Cohen tribute alongside Nick Cave and Jarvis Cocker. And she was the bar singer in The Aviator.

She also released an EP with an unrepeatable title track that gained immediate attention, and it is included on this impressive debut, which takes an unflinching look at life, sexuality and sex.

Try this for an opening couplet, "Catch a feel or cop a ride, I won't be late, I won't decline". Or this: "Got your hand up all in my shirt, and you know it hurts".

Then add in theatrical arrangements, a sense for vocal dramatics like Jeff Buckley, and a heart that can also be in graceful Anglo-folk and early Dylan anger. And she closes with a lean setting of a Robert Louis Stevenson poem.

It's a diversity of styles that dares you to look away.

That notoriously attention-grabbing song is, she says, "about my dad, or about everyone's dad, or that person who seems to judge you the most". If you know Loudon's often uncompromisingly autobiographical songs you'll get where she took permission to sing out her demons.

This Wainwright comes from a similarly unwavering place, but has some stinging guitars in support. It's often stunning, sometimes uncomfortable.

She sings, "I wish I was born a man, so I could learn how to stand up for myself like those guys with guitars I've been watching in bars, who've been stamping their feet to a different beat. I will not pretend, I will not put on a smile for you, I will not say I'm all right for you."

Take her as you find her but, from the bottom of her anxieties, she's on that different beat and isn't putting on a smile.

Now, who would've thought you'd enjoy being troubled by someone called Martha?

Label: Shock