Soap & Skin – Narrow

Anja Plaschg could have been nothing but an artist. The Austrian songwriter, now just 21 and recording as Soap & Skin, radiates pain in a manner that would clearly preclude her from doing anything other than writing about it. Narrow is her first release since 2009’s Lovetune for Vacuumm – a startling, wrenchingly unpleasant record that remains amongst the decade’s best. Shortly after the release of Lovetune Plaschg’s father died. The event has cast a dense shadow across Narrow – a shadow that is entirely understandable, but one which makes the record almost totally impenetrable.

Narrow is impossible to crack, in great part because there are no cracks in its desolate edifice. All is painfully dark. The rare forays into the major key feel not like relief, but like mockery; like the fiddlings of an acutely unhappy person who has been told that music will cheer them, but who knows it will not. Plaschg has enjoyed no respite, and neither will the listener.

There are moments of brilliance on Narrow. The stunning ‘Boat Turns Toward The Port’, for example, is as good as anything Plaschg has written, her grief-stricken voice dragging clattering percussion behind it as if it were a series of burdensome chains. Elsewhere there are phosphorescent flashes of quite stunning beauty, as in the final third of ‘Wonder’, a song which would be at home on Peter Gabriel’s underrated Up, and which feels as if it has come uncharacteristically easily to the songwriter.

But for the most part the collection feels directionless. On ‘Cradlesong’ or ‘Lost’ Plaschg strays dangerously close to a strange parody of English parlour music, while the Hollywood EBM of ‘Deathmental’ recalls the most acutely testosterone-fuelled excesses of Christopher Nolan collaborator Hans Zimmer. Much is made of the arrangements, and reasonably so; there are moments of orchestration that could have been plucked from a lost Scott Walker record. But beneath the digital pomp the songs often reveal themselves to be oddly one-dimensional.

Plaschg can be sure, at least, that she has made a record quite unlike anything else that will be released this year. She has transmuted her grief; forged it into a set of songs almost incomprehensibly dense. Narrow is gothic in the most essential sense – not Camden High Street gothic, but 18th Century literature gothic, 16th Century architecture gothic: peerlessly ambitious, occasionally stunning, and teeming with terrible, unimaginable horror. This is not of the same quality as Lovetune, but it is further illustration of the breadth of Plaschg’s talent – a talent that could yet prove itself to be generationally unique. Narrow is a record that deserves to be taken seriously. Just don’t expect it to be very much fun.