By Jimmy Draper

" Giving things a little bit of a creepier feel – that seems to be something we're good at," Dan Miller says, letting out a quiet laugh. "At least, 'creepy' is the way people always describe us."

Speaking over the phone from his Michigan home, the lead vocalist and guitarist of Detroit's premier Gothic-country combo, Blanche, seems slightly bemused that people find his band's music so outrageously eerie. "To me, we're just moody," he continues. "It's like when I listen to old blues and old country – a lot of our stuff has the same feeling as that music. It's just a little more stripped down and raw. We certainly didn't set out to make overly dark or melancholy music."

Whatever the group's intentions, it's easy to hear why Blanche gives so many listeners the heebee jeebees. After all, for nearly five years the quintet – which Dan fronts with his wife, bassist-vocalist Tracee Miller – has been perfecting the sort of haunting, front-porch noir that's made the Handsome Family and Trailer Bride favorites among fans of disturbingly bleak country music. Throughout their funereal dirges and nightmarish hymns, the Millers spin despairing tales of lives ravaged by paranoia, depression, and illness, among other myriad maladies. Not for nothing does Tracee conclude one song with, simply, "Sad, sad, sad, sad, sad...."

Things are so relentlessly grim on the band's 2004 debut, If We Can't Trust the Doctors ... (Cass/V2), in fact, that happiness never comes off as anything but an urban myth: "Hope paves the way to disappointment and pain," Dan laments in "The Hopeless Waltz." Elsewhere, deceased siblings are mourned, suicidal men plead for their organs to be hacked out.

Describing Blanche's music as "creepy" is far from misleading.

That wasn't always the case, however.

Throughout the first half of the '90s, Dan delivered far less severe – silly, even – songs in the cowpunk act Goober and the Peas. When he joined his wife and Jack White in the country-rock band Two-Star Tabernacle, in 1997, however, an unnervingly eerie motif began to emerge in his songwriting. It was in that group that he first penned "Who's To Say ..." a forlorn stalker song that would eventually appear on Doctors and as a B-side cover on the White Stripes' "I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself" single.

Still, it wasn't until Dan formed Blanche – alongside Tracee, Dave Feeny (pedal steel guitar, piano), Lil' Jack (banjo, autoharp), and Lisa "Jaybird" Jannon (drums) – that the spooky undercurrent in his songs fully blossomed. "We happen to keep things on the creepier side, but when we started it was just about having a similar attitude and liking the same kind of music," he recalls, explaining that several members were still learning their instruments at the time. "The number one thing was getting across the songs' emotion, so we started booking shows right away instead of rehearsing, which was probably a blessing and a curse. All five of us were pretty uncomfortable, but it made us bond together."

They also shared an enthusiasm for donning thrift-store suits, elegant gowns, and other old-fashioned garb. Rather than coming off as gimmicky, their from-the-past appearance nicely complements the tunes' over-the-top darkness. "We've always dressed like this," insists Dan. "When I first met Tracee 12 years ago, I saw her dressed pretty differently, and she saw me that way too. It was a birds-of-a-feather sort of thing – same with the other people in the band. We truly are like a really weird family."

Despite band members' elaborate outfits and their songs' melancholy, which can border on the comical in its excessiveness, Blanche aren't an exercise in camped-up alt-country. Instead, songs like "The Hopeless Waltz" and "Another Lost Summer" achieve a quiet, powerful poignancy. The effect is amplified by the fact that Doctors's grave tone owes a debt to real-life tragedy.

"We'd just gone through a really bad period, being in and out of hospitals a lot," says Dan, explaining that his brother (and former Goober bandmate, Michael Francis Miller) and grandmother, along with Tracee's father, passed away during the making of the album.

"So it's not just a clever lyric when [in 'Superstition'] I sing, 'It's bad luck to be superstitious,'" he continues. "It's something that I really thought in the waiting room, thinking, 'If I do this or that, will it bring back luck?' Then I'd think, 'Wait, I'm being superstitious – does being superstitious bring bad luck?' You have to laugh at yourself and the absurdity of it. But when you get really low and scared of the world, that stuff happens."

Fortunately, things have been looking up. Shortly after the tiny Detroit imprint Cass Records released Doctors early last year, the mammoth V2 reissued it to considerable acclaim. Blanche's fan base expanded as well, thanks largely to exposure from tours with the White Stripes and the Kills. Then there was the invitation for several of the band's members to play on Loretta Lynn's 2004 comeback, Van Lear Rose (Interscope).

Given such exciting developments, Dan hopes the worst is behind them.

"Everything feels really good right now," he says. "After going through all the tragic things that we've gone through, making music has been therapeutic in a way. But we're all excited to get working on a new album, and while I'm sure it will have a certain moodiness to it, let's just say I'm feeling a little more hopeful these days."

Blanche performs with the Ditty Bops and Youth Group Tues/21, 8 p.m., Great American Music Hall, 850 O'Farrell, SF. $13. (415) 885-0750.