Weird, uplifting, heartfelt.
Salty Brine does not simply perform an album. He takes it apart, rummages around inside it, follows its obsessions down unexpected rabbit holes, then somehow puts the whole thing back together again in front of us.
And this particular concoction is no overnight creation, this one has been marinating in Brine for the best part of a decade, part of Salty’s long-running Living Record Collection, in which numerous albums become the starting point for something altogether more theatrical, personal and peculiar.
The album at the heart of this one is Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, released in 1998, a record whose strangeness and relative unfamiliarity turn out to be one of the show’s great strengths. Unless you are already a devotee, chances are you will not know every song, perhaps you will not know any of them. Counterintuitively, that is a selling point.
Salty’s catalogue includes Bowie, Pink Floyd, The Beatles. In those shows we all know how the songs go. We have expectations. Here, Salty has much more room to play. The album’s otherness becomes his playground and leaves us free simply to surrender to his weird and wonderful interpretation.
It’s songwriter, Jeff Mangum, was deeply affected by The Diary of Anne Frank, while ideas of death, rebirth and reincarnation drift through the album’s surreal lyrics. They provide Salty with irresistible threads to pull. Every song from the album is still there, but around them he weaves Anne Frank, reincarnation and, inevitably, himself.
That last ingredient is crucial. If Anne Frank has her diary, Salty has his own recollections, and gradually one life begins reflecting against another. It could so easily become an intellectual exercise. Instead, it has a huge heart.
The album is never treated as some sacred object to be reproduced faithfully. It is raw material, something to be dismantled, reimagined and turned into theatre. There is a band stage, where much of the music happens, but also a forestage that allows Salty to move closer to us, breaking down the separation between performer and audience.
He barely stops moving. By the end he is sweating bucket loads, having seemingly poured every last ounce of himself into the performance. There are paper aeroplanes, stories, memories and digressions, yet the whole unlikely concoction holds together because Salty commits to it absolutely. And then there is that voice, full of power and passion.
Perhaps that is the real pleasure of a Salty Brine show. You arrive expecting to hear an album and leave feeling you have travelled somewhere completely different.
The album may provide the songs, but Salty provides the journey. And what a weird, wonderful journey it is.
Playing until August 30th 2026, https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/2026SALTYBR
Reviewer: Greg Holstead
Reviewed: 11th August 2026
North West End UK / Theatre Muse UK Rating:
Running time – 1hr 30mins