Album review: Soap & Skin

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8 / 10 Who knows what growing up on a pig farm in an Austrian village does to the creative psyche, but musicologists might want to use Anja Plaschg’s debut as research material, for this talented 18-year-old lays her soul bare throughout ‘Lovetune For Vacuum’. Her arrangements of icily rolling piano, violin and sudden, jarring fizzes of electronics recall Nico’s work after ‘Chelsea Girl’, when she crept dark corridors in the company of John Cale, while graves, gore and weeds darken Plaschg’s confessional lyricism. Nevertheless, she avoids the trap of presenting us with an exercise in self-loathing; this is a brutal dissection of love and innocence crushed. From among Teutonic swine, a dark and clouded pearl emerges.

Luke Turner

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