(Pictured: collective Jukebox reaction to previous song.)
[Video][Myspace]
[5.64]
Katherine St Asaph: Katie Stelmanis has a difficult voice: distinct and unforgiving, with vibrato up front and, where the vibrato would be, this undertone of a resigned sigh. (These are all compliments.) Before Austra, I’d only read about her in two contexts: people talking about Toronto’s music scene, a morass with about a hundred more tendrils than someone on this side of the border can truly comprehend, and people responding to all the breathless emails I sent them about about Join Us. So Austra breaking through was a surprise — and welcome. UK producer Hervé, though, suggests a reason I never quite loved the group; “Save Me,” a death march of a track, evokes the unsubtly sinister qualities of her solo work I hadn’t realized how much I missed. There’s so much space here, all filled with sundry spookery; Stelmanis doesn’t contribute vocals so much as play the most sonorous ghost.
[7]
Brad Shoup: The only way I can even approximate Stelmanis’ delivery is to assume major underbite, but I’ve seen Austra live, so how it’s actually done is a mystery. Her unrelenting clenched quaver jerks me out of a decently effective trip-horror soundscape.
[4]
Scott Mildenhall: Hervé seems to have many strings to his bow, and this shows off what might just be a new one. Nothing on his last album resembles it, its entombing doom and gloom lying closer to the work of its featured vocalist — but there’s a bit of a problem in that that’s pretty much all there is, and it’s not enough for it to stand up on alone.
[5]
Crystal Leww: This sounds like background music you play at an art gallery. Nothing is distracting, but that means nothing is distinct.
[3]
Alfred Soto: As cool as The Knife, Fever Ray, and even Portishead sound when they’re quavering and woozing, my instinct is usually, “Pick up the pace, guys.” Here’s the point at which my years-long ambivalence towards woozy horrorcore arrangements with quavery vocals collapses.
[4]
Ian Mathers: “Hey, you got your Austra in my CREEP!” “You got CREEP in my Austra!” Two great tastes that taste great together!
[8]
Will Adams: The demonic synth pad was a good start, but it just drones on and on for four minutes while some second-tier Florence Welch vamps above it.
[4]
Jer Fairall: The Machine called, they want their Florence back.
[4]
Iain Mew: Stelmanis’s elegantly tortured vocals are a major attraction of Austra, but they have a whole setup to convert those to synth-pop gold — “Beat and the Pulse” tells you that in its title. Hervé, though, is just here to supply some foreboding mood touches to foreground her voice (and later to provide a terrifying deep echo of it), and it’s still enough to astonish. The tension is exquisite.
[9]
Rebecca A. Gowns: This song makes me feel like I’ve just stepped outside, the door locks behind me, and it’s super cold. Uncomfortably cold. And now I’m vulnerable. I hate the cold, I don’t like dissonance, and I’m not the biggest fan of vibrato-voices (they remind me of goats); but I get what they’re trying to do and they did it quite well.
[7]
Patrick St. Michel: Sitting in my kitchen at 1 a.m. on one of the coldest days Tokyo has seen in a long time, the first thirty-some seconds of “Save Me” warrant a [10] from me because they sound so incredibly chilly and unsettling as to be almost designed for this dead-of-winter moment. The rest of the song seems content to circle around these synths — and the vocals seem to be trying way too hard, when the instrumental says so much more — so it loses some impact as it drags on. Still, I’m not going to bed any earlier tonight because of this.
[7]