Dresden Dolls’ theatrically eerie music has seen this pallid boy/girl duo from Boston hailed as cheerleaders of a new movement: ‘dark cabaret’. The debt owed to Brecht and Brel is in fact overstated – a truer comparison might be Tori Amos or Fiona Apple, with a sartorial wink towards Bauhaus and the vampire melodramas of Anne Rice.
Pop groups that devote themselves more or less exclusively to investigating the melancholy side of the human condition can look forward to a loyal – occasionally obsessive - fanbase and so it has proved for Dresden Dolls.
A week since the release of their second album, a suite of sulky pop tunes called Yes Virginia, their Irish debut draws a capacity crowd. Not all of those in attendance sport white mascara and vampy lipstick – but there are enough to make you wonder whether you haven’t got your dates mixed up and have turned up to see a Marilyn Manson tribute act by accident.
Such gothic trappings belie Dresden Dolls’ sound, which sets itself the challenge of relying only of piano, drums and vocals and, in its own, moochy way, is darkly pretty. Crouched so low behind her keyboard that many in the audience can make out only the very top of her head, singer Amanda Palmer, who dresses like an abandoned Victorian china doll, throws out twinkling piano notes while alternating between a delicate croon and an impassioned yelp that may have put the listener in mind of smashed crockery and cracked mirrors.
Perched at the other side of the stage, drummer Brian Viglione serves as a sort of ironic comic relief. Viglione, wearing bowler hat and charcoal coloured waist-coat, mugs wildly to Palmer’s lyrics, pulling mime-artist faces and freezing on the spot. In other circumstances, his vaudeville turn might have been profoundly irritating. Accompanying Palmer’s menacing playing, his pratfalls feel thrillingly appropriate.