Sixties veteran Marianne Faithfull says her cover of Herman’s Hermits’ hit "I’m into Something Good" is sincere, yet when she began her set at the Paradise this past Saturday with the 1964 puppy-love anthem, the move looked calculated for shock value. The song’s sugary lyrics seemed utterly incongruous when propelled by her wizened, raspy voice — a sound produced by vocal cords seemingly reduced to beef jerky through decades of drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes.

As the final, Billy Corgan–arranged track of her new Kissin Time (Virgin), "I’m into Something Good" is almost an antidote to an album full of contemplations of rebirth, eulogies, and celebrations of sex, love, power, and decadence. But on stage the song seemed a gimmick, albeit one adoringly receiving by a crowd that tilted toward the 40s demographic and doted on her every minimal gesture.

Who can blame them? There is undeniable appeal in Faithfull’s story of pop princesshood in the court of the Rolling Stones and on the British charts followed by a long, terrible fall and a resurrection engineered by her brilliant 1979 comeback album Broken English (Island) and her subsequent bootstraps rehab in Boston. She is also an artist of considerable merit, with an ability to inhabit her songs as thoroughly as Leonard Cohen or Serge Gainsbourg, and with the same cabaret entertainer’s sense of drama.

The latter seemed oddly subdued through the first half of her Paradise concert, but Faithfull had an ace up her sleeve in the form of her new band. It’s the first time since she toured her Broken English material that she’s hit the road with a rock group, and the walls of cacophonous sound set up and struck down by guitarist Brian McFie and keyboardist Andy May, along with the often tribal intensity of drummer John Boyle and bassist Garry John Kane, accorded the Beck-penned "Kissin Time" and other numbers a wealth of dynamics and energy until Faithfull was able to shift into gear.

Perhaps the problem was the stage fright she often talks about, because after she lit a cigarette during "Song for Nico," she relaxed into the material. Her voice opened wider for "Rich Kid Blues" and Shel Silverstein’s crowd-pleasing tale of suburban madness, "The Eyes of Lucy Jordan." But when she swung into the hard-bitten chunks of life that made up the final section of her set — John Lennon’s "Working Class Hero," "Broken English," "Sliding Through Life on Charm," and "Why Do Ya Do It?" — her resort to a notebook with the lyrics on a music stand gave an unintentionally comic turn to the proceedings. She donned her half-glasses, which with her short-trimmed hair and conservative black suit made her look like a schoolmarm, and shot glances at the pages, to come back with lines like, "Why do ya do it, she said/Why’d ya spit on my snatch/Are we out of love now/Is it just a bad patch."

Later that night, at Johnny D’s in Somerville, new-era bluesman Otis Taylor dispensed with the need for such support by simply making up plenty of his lyrics and music as he went along. The songs from his three groundbreaking albums, including the new Respect the Dead (Northernblues), tap an encyclopædia full of dark pages from African-American history, and they were often stretched into 10-minute jams. All he needed to embellish stories like the betrayal-revenge fable "Black Witch" were improvisations on the themes of abuse and imprisonment within his potent writing, and he repeated them until they took on inescapable weight.

Throughout his second set, Taylor’s tales of midnight lynchings and hallucinations brewed storm clouds heavy as those that hung over the most chilling stories of John Lee Hooker, the late bluesman whose potent spirit seems closest to Taylor’s. The main difference is that Taylor takes his blues both farther back (to Africa) and forward (into sonic experimentation) than Hooker did. The drumless support of daredevil guitarist Eddie Turner and Taylor’s bassist/producer, Kenny Passarelli, locked meticulously into Taylor’s open-tuned rhythm and lead playing on banjo, mandolin, and guitar.

Together the trio used African string-instrument lines, repetition, and digital delay to craft rhythmic melodies that meshed and spun with clockwork precision, creating a hypnotic effect comparable to the late Junior Kimbrough’s Mississippi hill-country music, though vastly different. One of Taylor’s last introductions — "This is a song about a man. His baby’s dying, ’cause he can’t get health care. All he’s got is his religion." — summed up the drama and pain that broils in many of his songs.