SOAP&SKIN

From Gas To Solid/you are my friend 8/10

Austrian avant-pop diva allows a little sunshine into her gloomscape

Breaking a six-year musical hiatus mostly occupied with new motherhood, charttopping Austrian composer and avantgothic torch singer Anja Plaschg’s rich third album is simultaneously her most formally experimental and melodically palatable yet. Her samplewoven chamber-pop soundscapes are less abrasive and her ache-filled multi-tracked vocals less ferociously bleak than on previous releases, which were partly responses to family bereavement. Ethereal choral pieces and gorgeous brass-band lullabies punctuate more conventional songs, like the crystalline Björkish chanson “Heal” and the majestic, cascading, electro-orchestral beauty “Falling”. A crepuscular take on evergreen standard “What A Wonderful World” rounds off this voluptuous collection on a note of fragile, ambivalent optimism.