Seeing Adia Victoria perform live is a little like watching a vampire say mass.

Certainly, the gothic blues singer has a vampiric glamour and intensity that is almost impossible to ignore. When I saw her she appeared arrayed in her vestments, a floor length black dress with bright red cowboy boots flashing underneath, and with the blues as her church, began the ancient ritual of singing — standing, kneeling, entwined with her fellow performers and flat on her back, the heel of one boot to the South Carolina sky.

Her music is shot through with ghosts, holy and otherwise. There is something deliciously eerie about much of it, particularly songs like “Devil is a lie” and “Clean.”

First of all, there is no god
‘Cause I went out and killed my God
And laid his body in the dirt
I killed him clean, so it did not hurt…

Not all of her tracks are so metaphysical, “Head Rot” has a grungy, rock ‘n roll feel, while “South Gotta Change” is a straightforward political anthem. But none of them quite feel like anything else you’ve ever heard.

The lyrics are accentuated by Victoria’s voice: almost falsetto, but never strangled — a haunted breeze whispering through Spanish moss. She can, and does, sing full throated blues, like on her single “Ain’t Killed Me Yet,” but it is her high, quavering tracks that make the hair on the back of your arms stand up.

Victoria takes to heart the old blues message that when you accept you were born to die, it’s easier to get on with living. In her congregation the end is a given, it is what happens now that matters. In place of bread and wine she offers gin and weed, for tolling bells the tap-tap-tap of a tambourine on her thigh. She looks the South, blood soaked and Christ haunted, dead in the eye, blasphemies tin gods; not a rejection, but a reckoning.