http://www.stagefrightpublicity.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Austra.jpg

 Feel It Break [2011]Domino Records / WIG270

[img]http://i128.photobucket.com/albums/p180/SonAfterDark/tracklistlatest.png[/img]

1. Darken Her Horse (5:21)
2. Lose It (4:29)
3. The Future (4:03)
4. Beat and the Pulse (4:56)
5. Spellwork (5:10)
6. The Choke (4:12)
7. Hate Crime (4:02)
8. The Villain (4:06)
9. Shoot the Water (3:23)
10. The Noise (3:32)
11. The Beast (4:03)

On her own and under her own name, Katie Stelmanis used to record synthetic art-pop. This was tense and jarring music, music that jumped around and demanded attention. Austra, Stelmanis' new band, makes just as much use of her stretched-out yip and her theatrical instincts, but the music is a lot warmer and more comfortable. Austra play a warm, hazy sort of electro-goth. It's synthetic and repetitive, and there's plenty of Giorgio Moroder in its DNA, but it's not dance music. Instead, it's music for a planetarium, or maybe for a mid-1980s PBS science documentary. Austra's synth riffs don't pound or undulate; they flutter and envelop. And Stelmanis doesn't sing over the top of their tracks; she emits sound from somewhere in the thick of it.

Feel It Break, Austra's debut album, is essentially made up of 11 minor variations on a single sound-- no complaint, since they're good at that one sound. It's tough to talk about Stelmanis' icy, high-pitched deadpan delivery without mentioning Kate Bush. By that same token, it's tough to talk about the band's music without mentioning Witching Hour-era Ladytron, or maybe Bat for Lashes. This is pretty and heady music, music that can subtly change the air in the room where it's playing. Drums lightly percolate rather than thud, and synth riffs hide inside each other like Russian nesting dolls, gradually revealing themselves over the course of entire songs. And the group builds these things patiently. Often, it holds back on introducing vocals or drums for more than a full minute, letting the songs' feel develop before making any radical changes.

These songs aren't entirely alike. First single "Beat and the Pulse" has a telescoping sort of push-pull to it; it's the closest the band ever comes to genuine dance music, and even it doesn't come that close. On "Lose It", Stelmanis gets a chance to stretch her huge, tremulous voice over some minimally invasive synth backing, and she sounds titanic: "Don't wanna loooooose ya." The bouncy art-pop piano on "Shoot the Water" has a certain twitchiness, bringing Stelmanis partway back to her solo days. And closing tracks "The Noise" and "The Beast" do away with percussion entirely, letting Stelmanis sing over miasmic synth fog on the former and floridly ghostly piano on the latter.

Even with those variations, though, Feel It Break still works as a monochromatic album, one content to stick with the same shade of glimmering darkness. Onstage at SXSW a couple of months ago, Austra cut a stark figure-- Stelmanis backed by two stunning, harmonizing twins, the rest of the band half-hidden at the back of the stage. Even playing in the middle of an absurdly sunny day, the band seemed to exist in some vague state of perpetual glamorous nighttime; that could've been them, not Bauhaus, serenading David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve during the great opening scene of Tony Scott's otherwise bullshit vampire movie, The Hunger. On Feel It Break, they've got that creeping cinematic synth-psych style down cold. Moving forward, I'm curious to hear what else they can do.

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http://dickthespic.org/2011/12/30/austra/