Send "Austra " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 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....full text |
| Ventvox |
| Austra is the brainchild of the classically trained vocalist, pianist Katie Stelmanis (formerly of the riot grrl pop band Galaxy) along with drummer Maya Postepski (also ex-Galaxy) and bassist Dorian Wolf (ex-Spiral Beach). Citing influences from Bjork, PJ Harvey, and Nine Inch Nails, the Toronto trio weaves a layered, MIDI-soaked, atmospheric audible tapestry. And if it seems like I’m tossing around a lot of big words, that’s because their debut Feel It Break is a record of big sounds. Stelmanis’s haunting vocals envelope you and her voice is at once eerie and beautiful. While Austra’s influences are readily apparent, the band stands out among its gothy/electronic contemporaries, largely due to Stelmanis’s enchanting voice. With a background that includes singing for the Canadian Opera Company and touring the DIY punk scene, Stelmanis seems to be bringing all of her experience to bear in Feel It Break. The songs flow together, giving the album a cohesive atmospheric feel. That’s not to say it’s background music; you’ll find yourself swaying to the mid-tempo beats and catching an occasional hook on songs like “The Choke,” “Hate Crime,” and “The Noise.” But Feel It Break isn’t an album with any one stand-out song—it’s a record that deserves to be listened to from start to finish. Preferably with headphones....full text |
| Slantmagazine |
| Katie Stelmanis is an unlikely ingenue. The Toronto-based singer joined the Canadian Children's Opera at the age of 10 and planned to go to college to pursue a career in classical music. But she had a sudden change of heart after she saw a punk show and started listening to Nine Inch Nails, and Stelmanis's debut under the moniker Austra is rooted in her desire, as she puts it in the press notes, "to make classical music with really fucked up, distorted crazy shit on there." It's not exactly classical, but Stelmanis shares with Trent Reznor a desire to make "goth" music that's both lyrically and sonically dense. With the help of mixer Damian Taylor, she's created a debut album, Feel It Break, that combines the atmospherics of darker new wave with a thumping, Giorgio Moroder-type beat. It's big in scope, but clean in sound. Every detail of the production feels carefully thought out. In the background, it's all piano, chimes, drums, and sleek synths. At the front, it's Stelmanis's voice, a glorious Kate Bush-like caterwaul that can also drop much lower, as on "The Future," in which she lets out a primal shudder, or the lead single "Beat and the Pulse," in which she sounds like she's inhaling air, an oddly suggestive noise. Stelmanis's voice is frequently beautiful, but it can also be pained and confrontational. On the second single, "Lose It" (the most affecting electronic song this side of Mandalay's "It's Enough Now"), she sings, "Don't wanna lose ya/I never knew ya," before jumping an octave higher and chanting along to the melody. Most of the time, though, she's talking about a more violent form of love. On "The Future," she imagines a relationship wasting away: "I came so hard/In your mouth/I saw the future/It was dark." On "The Choke," she describes a physical encounter in vague, disconcerting terms ("the lamp, the slip, the floor"), before the tranquil beat gives way to a soft refrain of "Niagara, Niagara, Niagara." It's these juxtapositions—between hard and soft, light and dark, erotic and dangerous—that give the album its tension: Stelmanis's idea of a good love song is one that makes you dance even while it gets under your skin. For their most recent album, the Pains of Being Pure at Heart worked with producers Flood and Alan Moulder to make a revivalist shoegazing record that, at its worst, was criticized for sounding a little too much like its predecessors. Austra has done something similar, conjuring a feeling that seems authentically of a different time. Even the song titles look like they were lifted from the Cocteau Twins: "Spellwork," "Darken Her Horse," "The Beast." That's also what's most endearing about Stelmanis: Her effort is entirely earnest and self-contained. She repeatedly refers to "the darkness" throughout the album, seemingly unaware that such mystical references went out of fashion by the time the Cure went platinum....full text |
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