When Eliza Carthy played the Boston area last spring, she had her work cut out for her. She was the special guest at a Joan Baez show at the Somerville Theatre, where the audience was largely the same old-time Cambridge folkies who see Arlo Guthrie every Thanksgiving. After Baez did her first few numbers, on leapt Carthy, who sported bright blue hair, a chin piercing, and a loose peasant dress. She greeted the crowd with a boisterous “How ya doing?” Her stage manner practically screamed, “You don’t like me, but you will.”

And everybody did. Carthy, who returns to Boston this Sunday to headline the Paradise, proceeded to display a gorgeous singing voice, an accomplished fiddle style, and a deep understanding of English traditional songs (which comes to her naturally, since her parents are the top-rank trad singers Martin Carthy and Norma Waterson). If you’ve discovered her import albums, her progress over the past five years has been fascinating to watch: she began as the junior partner in a trio with her parents but gradually took over most of the spotlight — in fact, she’s now producing her mom’s solo album. Eliza’s own last album, the double-CD Red Rice (UK Topic), was where her own personality emerged. One disc was all traditional; the other integrated folk styles with world-beat touches and trip-hop drum loops. In its own way, it sounded as groundbreaking as the early albums by Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span (then her father’s band) did in the ’70s.

A pop album and a US debut were the next logical steps, and she makes both on Angels & Cigarettes (Warner Bros). It is a really pretty album — to be specific, a really pretty Beth Orton–type record. The singing is crystalline, the textures are electro-acoustically rich, and the tunes verge on nonexistent. Patently pitched at hipper adult-contemporary formats, the disc may well achieve its aim of making Carthy a stateside star. But the wild streak in her folk music doesn’t turn up in her pop. Instead, her approach here — lightly eclectic music and slightly daring lyrics within a lush, reassuring package — are exactly what AC is all about. The drum loops that were so startling on Red Rice come across as ordinary. And over 10 slow-paced and heavily produced tracks, even Carthy’s remarkable voice — earthy and regal at once, like Orton’s and Sandy Denny’s — becomes just another soothing element.

Maybe the problem is that she isn’t as well-steeped in pop music as in folk, so she doesn’t know a well-traveled road when she walks one. In the days before Liz Phair, Carthy’s confession that “I’ve given blow jobs on couches to men who didn’t want me anymore” (a lyric from “In the Company of Men” that’s quoted in three different sections of her press kit) might have raised eyebrows; here it reminds us that she hasn’t been writing songs for very long yet. Indeed, more daring than the song itself is Carthy’s admission that she got stuck setting those words to music, so she handed them over to her dad. “It didn’t cross my mind that there might be a problem,” she reveals over the phone from her home in England. “But it crossed his mind quite early on. I mean, we’re close, but we’re not that close, though he knows what I got up to as a teenager. But I have a great tape of him trying to sing those words and saying, ‘Hold on a minute — I’ve never given a blow job to anyone in my life!’ ”

On the phone Carthy displays the same personality that won over the audience at the Baez show. And she admits that Angels & Cigarettes wasn’t the album she initially set out to make. “The producer [Al Scott, who’s done the Levellers] made a couple of executive decisions. I was interested in pursuing a few dance-music connections and writing songs with a view to getting them in the clubs. But he put his foot down and said, ‘I want some strong songs; the backing is irrelevant.’ I had to insist that, no, it wasn’t — for one thing I play violin, so I had to have the strings on there. But it’s good to have a producer who’s a strong character and could rein us all in.”

She also notes that the new disc’s gotten a mixed reaction in the UK, where the “future of folk music” tag has followed her around for a few years. “If people are fans, they don’t want you to change on them. The main difference between this and Red Rice was that we had stacks of money and more time to do it — Red Rice was two and a half weeks; this took nearly three years. It is a bit of a culture shock to my fans, but I’ve never taken an easy road and I would hope that my audience would want to come along. So I don’t know the mainstream music scene in America, but I’m hoping it would do well. Because you know, I have another few pretty decent albums in me.”

Eliza Carthy headlines the Paradise this Sunday, April 1. Call 423-NEXT.