Edinburgh Fringe 2026
How Strange It Is
Salty Brine
Genre: Cabaret, Live Music, New Writing
Venue: Summerhall
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
The next album to be added to Salty Brine’s Living Record Collection, How Strange It Is takes the band Neutral Milk Hotel’s 1998 indie-rock cult record In the Aeroplane Over the Sea and Anne Frank’s candid The Diary of a Young Girl and fuses them with confessions from Salty’s adolescent longings, a canter through theories on reincarnation and a primer on human reproduction.
Review
Brine’s format for the Living Record Collection is to take a deep dive into the lyrics of the chosen album and pull on the threads of meaning he finds there; no need for the audience to know or indeed like the artist to enjoy this deconstruction. Neutral Milk Hotel’s lyricist was influenced by reading Anne Frank’s diary but also reincarnation and human bodily functions. Even the naffer lyrics are treated with passionate commitment, the songs honoured, not derided. Brine is keen to share his teenage diaries and youthful attempts at poetry, gently mocking his younger self. Across 970 diary entries, young Salty keeps asking where he belongs. He weaves his romantic and physical encounters with Frank’s blossoming relationship with fellow hideaway resident Peter and in the process strips away the elevated image we have of Frank to reveal her as just a young girl falling for a young boy. The result is a truly moving fantasy about reuniting through in reincarnation, defying the most cynical disbeliever not to wish for a happy ending for the pair.
A washing line of white underwear stretches across the stage, it references the Frank family’s attic, projections are layered over the top. Brine and the band have a costume aesthetic which is giving clean cut college boy to complement the exploration of young love. The musicians are top-notch performers and skilled multi-instrumentalists playing a tight set. Several arrangers are credited (Nate Weida, Richard Aufrichtig and Alex Thrailkill) and this uptempo cover version really elevates the original recording. Brine’s performance is thrilling, the MC and star vocalist rolled into one.
A preoccupation with dates threads through the show – Brine’s diary, Anne’s diary, the album’s release, careering back in time to the big bang and the size of the universe. It becomes a comfort to know we are transitory dust specks that sometimes randomly coalesce to be two people who meet and fall in love. Paper aeroplanes, representing wandering souls, are launched through space and time by a giddy audience.
The show gets a bit baggy in the middle section and although the format demands that each track from the album is performed (dictating the show’s length) is there an opportunity to trim some material? The biology lesson felt overlong and less original in this otherwise original take on the themes explored. That minor quibble aside, this is an uplifting, funny, warm and exuberant celebration of youthful love and the wonders of the cosmos, a late night tonic for the soul.
