Soap & Skin - Lovetune for Vacuum

Judging by the doom and gloom pervading Anja Plaschg's debut album, it must really suck growing up on a pig farm in southern Austria. A bedroom composer since she was 12 years old, Plaschg has been playing piano and recording for six years, lacing her melancholic musings with so much misery that Lovetune for Vaccum comes across as aural cyanide, an unrelenting love letter to abject despair of the teenage kind. The bleakness, at least, clips along at a fair pace, with a minimalist dance beat puttering away in the background, underneath the Kate Bush vocal delivery and Björk-esque kookiness. While a laptop reimagining of Wuthering Heights might have the average indie connoisseur running for the hills, there is real beauty to be found here. Plaschg is a gifted singer, and there is a certain catharsis in having someone else look this far into the abyss, so that we don't have to. [Ewen Millar]