Winning '11: 6 - Austra

Austra - Feel It Break

I just have to look at my year end lists over the last decade to see how crucial my year writing for Stylus Magazine in 2006 was to the development of my tastes. Exposed to a community of passionate and inspiring people who knew very different things, and saw things very different ways from me, I tried out stuff which I probably never would have done otherwise and took me at least a little away from the (British, male) indie rock which made up all. And some of the new stuff was awesome. One of the most critical records of that year was the haunted forest electro-pop of The Knife's Silent Shout. Maybe as a result I'm slightly over-inclined to see its influence, but there do seem to be a succession of new acts in the last couple of years who have been inspired by it and Austra are my favourite.

Not to say that Feel it Break is a mere imitator. It uses many similar sounds and tones and has a very similar stark and alien beauty - the deep throb of single "The Beat and the Pulse" is probably closest of all - but Feel it Break doesn't have the same fearful, cold distance or crushing force of sound. There are no mental rave-outs or pitch-shifted voices and Austra are more pop and less electro, have more open spaces. The plain piano backdrop of "The Beast" is the most extreme case, but "Lose It" and "Shoot the Water" both let in a lot more light. At least as far as it's possible to with a chorus of 'I want your blood/I want it in my hair'.

That couplet is an illustration of the way that Austra get much of their intensity and uniqueness from Katie Stelmanis' lyrics and voice. She specialises in an straightforward and unstinting darkness and while there are plenty of inspired moments like the evocative flashed images of "The Choke" ('The lamp. The slip. The floor.'), there's no obliqueness or indirectness. Together with the fact that she's front and centre and very clearly putting across the words to be heard and considered it kind of inevitably ends up with songs which could easily be considered quite silly. By neither steering away from ridiculousness or ever quite letting on that they're aware of it, though, Austra are able to use the reaction of humour and turn it into part of the heightening of emotional reaction. At least, that's how it works for me. "Hate Crime" being called "Hate Crime", having verses of struggling with avoiding sympathy with the darkness, and then in its chorus having Katie sternly intoning, over catchy synthpop, 'who signed the consent forms??' is amazing and somehow even more intense and sinister. The effect is quite similar to what I get from a lot of Editors songs and what I was the only person on the Jukebox to get from The Vaccines' "Post Break Up Sex", though Austra have crafted a set of songs which make making the bargain of accepting pomp as part of the appeal for their length much, much easier.