SIBERRY FINDS HER NICHE AT BEVERLY

It may be time to retire the convenient comparisons to Joni and Laurie and Suzanne and Kate, because Jane Siberry’s Beverly Theatre show on Friday was the work of a distinctive, and distinctly non-derivative, performer. Less novel but more assertive than she was at last year’s Roxy show, the theatrical Canadian gave full rein to her quirks--oddly choreographed singer/dancers, muttered monologues, surreal lyric twists--but made those quirks more captivating than cloying.

That’s partly because she’s simply a lot of fun. Mostly, though, it’s because her music--shifting abruptly from full-bodied rock to skeletal, atmospheric passages--is an ideally skewed vehicle for lyrics in which the characters seem perpetually disoriented and displaced, whether at a cocktail party or in a prison cell. And amid her wry but distanced precision, it was heartening to hear “You Don’t Need” and “The Taxi Ride,” two deeply moving faded-love songs that found Siberry unexpectedly open and vulnerable.