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

Summerhall, EdinburghIntertwining his diaries with Anne Frank’s gives Brine a tough job, but his passionate performance and force of will combine in a heady brew 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. Combining extracts from his diary and from Frank’s, Brine vividly evokes the headlong nature of youthf