Album Of The Week: Austra Olympia

Music critics make mistakes all the time, and I made one two years ago, when I reviewed Austra's debut album Feel It Break for Pitchfork. I gave that album a positive review, but it was one of those wait-and-see positive reviews, like, "They're onto something here! Let's see what they can do next time around!" This was wrong. They were not onto something. They did something. Austra was, and is, the group led by Katie Stelmanis, a much-admired fixture on Toronto's art-punk scene with a voice like a heavily medicated soaring eagle. She'd linked up with a group of synthetic musicians and a pair of unearthly-beautiful twins who sang soft-monotone backing vocals, and together, they'd made an album of miasmic, uncanny synthpop, music that used the grammar of dance music to cast a warm spell that never once invited dancing. The album stuck firmly within a single mode, never varying from its thick and deep central sound, and maybe that lack of variance was why I didn't entirely trust the spell that the album cast on me. If they expanded that core sound, I thought, maybe that spell would become stronger. This was dumb, because two years later, that album's spell lingers; it might've even gained in strength. But it wasn't entirely dumb, because now Austra have made an album that expands on their original sound, and it's even better than the one that came before.