Salty Brine: How Strange It Is (The Neutral Milk Hotel Show) review – one of today’s most powerful stage voices

3 hours ago 5

It’s a hell of a swing to make a show paralleling your first love with Anne Frank’s – the more so for that show about her to end on an uplift. But Salty Brine is nothing if not the man for a big swing. This most overbrimming of cabaret artists is in town with his Living Record Collection project, which makes shows inspired by, and featuring, the songs from beloved rock and pop albums. This one takes Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea as the launchpad for an inquiry into religious traditions, the origins of the world, the migration of souls – and the adolescent passions of Frank and Brine.

Is it in poor taste, I wondered, to co-opt the horrifying story of this murdered teenager for aesthetic effect? In Brine’s defence, the album in question itself riffs dreamlike on Frank’s story, fashioning from it something deeply moving – and the same could be said, for my money, of How Strange It Is.

Deeply moving … Salty Brine in How Strange It Is (The Neutral Milk Hotel Show)

Combining extracts from his diary and from Frank’s, Brine vividly evokes the headlong nature of youthful passion, impossible to restrain even in the most constrained circumstances. Where does all that energy go when a life – not just Frank’s but that of her sweetheart, Peter – stops? With paper aeroplanes, a PowerPoint about reincarnation and one of the most powerful voices on the stage today, Brine hurls Jeff Mangum’s lyrics at the problem to see what sticks.

Not everything does. Brine has a tougher job here than with the Smiths’ and Annie Lennox’s work (to cite two recent examples) making the lyrics serve the beats of his story or the points he is trying to make. That’s sometimes frustrating – and elsewhere, not all of his connection-making resonates. But the material with which he is conjuring (life and death, what love and life add up to, and what we leave behind) is so emotionally potent, and the force of will applied to the undertaking so irresistible, that he makes the synthesis soar. Rhapsodic source material, passionate performance, cosmic sense-making: it’s a heady brew late night on the fringe, and an intoxicating one.