It's a personal victory for me when I'm able to find new music that I genuinely feel I will be listening to 5 years down the line and beyond. So many people fall into this vicious cycle of gratification and disposition, where they'll obtain an album, play the shit out of it, fall in love with it, be distracted by something else that's newer and completely forget about it within three months - rinse and repeat. I think that a number of exposed, overexposed and underexposed music artists are accommodating this behavior by making music that, while initially serviceable, is found dead and mangled on a barge in a New York City river not long after the music's introduction to its audience.
This idea, I feel, supports my theory that a lot of music - popular and unpopular, past and present, across the spectrum of genres - is not necessarily -bad-, it's just boring. Which is just taking the long way around to being bad again. Why is it boring? Because, wittingly or unwittingly, it was made to be boring. It's boring with a hint of enjoyment - just enough to deceive you into feeling something kindred with the album. This is so you can apply some transient meaning to otherwise life-shaping events, like that shitty relationship you're in, or that elation from getting promoted at work, or that ramble-on road trip you always wanted to take from Columbia, Missouri to Pasadena, California.
But this particular music never sticks around. You won't fondly look back on it, you'll think about the experience by itself. The spell of that music will have long since dissipated, as the endless roulette of new artists and bands spins onwards and onwards. I feel like I know myself well enough to proactively avoid these kinds of groups and save my time for something I find to have personal and preferential longevity. That doesn't stop me completely from being snake-oiled into liking certain cardboard artists, but I do try. Regardless of whether or not you feel that the last three paragraphs are the rantings of a pretentious twat, I think we can all appreciate the idea of an artist or band sticking with us for the long haul, like a devoted friend, through the ravages of taste and time.
I've been having that very hum of assurance with a small-time (working towards medium-time) Canadian group called Austra, who recently released their debut LP, Feel It Break on Domino Records. The first song I heard from the album was the single "Lose It," something I initially didn't know what to make of. All these cacophonous women singing over analog synthesizers and 808 drum machines - I felt that maybe it was just fodder for current aesthetic trends. Big mistake. The seed was planted in my head, I couldn't stop thinking about "Lose It" for weeks and eventually I listened to it again. The way vocalist Katie Stelmanis delivered desperate lines like the recurring "don't want to lose you, don't want to lose," and "I get impatient with every word/ the more you ask me, the more I've heard," over punctuated analog synthesizers sent the most electrifying chills down my spine.
And, honestly, the rest of Feel It Break follows "Lose It" in mystifying glory. Traveling to these deep, dark woods that Austra has created is a journey into a foreboding place. A place where pale green light shimmers through the openings of dense, intertwined branches. It's almost as if Stelmanis and the Tasseomancy twins are three seductive witches, conjuring vast amounts of reverb and electricity to ensure that you never leave the forest again. The album has a very distinctive tug and pull between obsidian gothic and buzz-saw groove that is nigh impossible to resist, especially on repeated listenings. Songs like "The Beat and the Pulse" and "Spellwork" suggest that, although the forest is possessed, the spirits know how to get down and shake a leg.
Yet, the album retains a sense of gravity by conveying memories of anguish, likely to do with precarious, wavering relationships. On "The Beast", Stelmanis speaks on emotional liberty wrought by relational expectations, singing "The morning I was born again, I was made into a beast," and "Am I free now, am I at peace/Is that the ground below me or your feet?" built up with a rolling, grandiose piano.
Other songs highlight strands of abrupt backlash, where Stelmanis weaves phrases like, "I want your blood, I want it in my hair" on "Shoot the Water" and "Feeding on bones or anything grown," on "Spellwork". There's also, "I came so hard in your mouth/I saw the future, it was dark," on "The Future", which may be a playful (or resentful) allusion to oral sex, and if it is, bravo to Austra. It was a genius move fitting a blatant but engaging line into such operatic music.
In the end, Feel It Break is a strange, bewitched offering of nocturnal ritual dances and spectral tone-poems, an album that works its electro-magic consistently from front to back. There isn't a weak link in this chain. Austra's debut, in my eyes, is a testament to the merits of unfiltered genesis. It's music that has the distinct potential for sticking around despite the boring music that constantly out-surrounds them. And I couldn't ask for more than that.
