Soap&Skin – Purcell Rooms, London 20/10/09

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Photography: Anika Mottershaw

19-year old Austrian wunderkind Anja Plaschg is quite the star in her home country, and it’s not difficult to see why. Her powerful, eccentric debut album Lovetune For Vacuum perfectly captures the essence of her idiosyncratic talents, delivering an experience that is at turns beautiful and brutal- qualities her performance tonight accentuates to the utmost.

The show begins in relatively reserved fashion, Plaschg’s vocals veering between shimmering delicacy and steely Teutonic harshness but as the show progresses her manner becomes ever more intense, the hammering on her Steinway increasingly unrestrained, her voice starting to crack with unsettling emotion. The harrowingly anguished scream that punctuates Spiracle surely sent a shiver down the spine of everyone in the room, but her more subtle moments were just as enrapturing- with just a piano and a laptop she managed to hold the audience’s full attention for the entirety of her hour-long set. At one point she leaps off the stage and marches throughout the venue, bellowing unamplified vocals in German; for ‘Marche Funebre’ she departs from her piano stool and dances like Helena Bonham Carter emulating a malfunctioning robot- and yet it works, because it fits perfectly with the unhinged nature of her music. She rarely acknowledges the audience except with the occasional furtive glance and whispered “thank you”, but if she does come across as aloof, it’s because she’s devoting herself so wholeheartedly to her performance- when a technical hitch temporarily derails her, the tears in her eyes are plain to see.

If there’s one minor criticism (and it is minor), it’s her over-reliance on laptop backing tracks- they work well during the heavier, more sinister material, but one feels lighter, more instrumental songs like ‘Cry Wolf’ would have been served better with tweaked arrangements instead. But that apart, it’s an almost flawless set from quite possibly the most exciting new talent of 2009, and I for one will be fascinated to see what she does next.