Retrospective Reviews: Austra's ‘Feel It Break’

The first sound presented on Austra’s debut LP has little sympathy for whatever routine its listeners were enjoying before pressing play. There is no fade in – just a blunt and weighty synth note announcing the album’s arrival like a computer prompt warning that if you exit before saving changes, not even the dark arts will be able to rescue your lost work. It’s arresting, it’s foreboding, it’s persuasive, and it’s surreal. Released three years ago, Feel it Break was as much about sensory engagement as each of its 11 opera/synthpop hybrids dug into (inter)personal disconnection. And in less than one full second, that note succeeds as the perfect harbinger for all of it.

Although it’s anything but a solo undertaking, Austra is still best understood through the progress of lead singer Katie Stelmanis’s musical career. Having trained in classical music and opera until she was 19, the band came together shortly after Stelmanis released her solo art pop debut, Join Us, in 2008. When she took the album on tour the next year, Stelmanis solicited the help of classical percussionist and Trust producer Maya Postepski, who she had previously performed with in post-riot grrrl band Galaxy. Between shows, the two started reworking some of Stelmanis’s newer material with the dance floor in mind, and after recruiting Spiral Beach bassist Dorian Wolf, who had been experimenting with making weird sounds on Logic, they soon programmed drearier sounding pop songs that anchored their leader’s soaring vocals. They took on a new name to reflect the roles Postepski and Wolf played in arriving at the overhauled sound, and Austra was born. Critics called their debut things like “witch house” and “goth,” and they weren’t wrong.

Feel It Break is a dark record. The gloomy atmospheres that pervade all throughout washed in new wave synth soup, it’s rich with melancholia and goth arcana. Stelmanis’s voice is icy, tremulous, and penetrating. The songs are packed with lyrical allusions to spell casting and conjuring demons; it’s easy to translate the foreboding imagism of “The Choke” as a portrait of a pasty fortune teller declaring inevitable doom à la tarot: “The lamp, the car, the door./ The lamp, the slip, the floor.”

But as much as Feel It Break wallows in despair, it’s not as if it was put together as an album that accesses profound darkness for the base sake of communicating sadness or interpolating a subculture. Instead, it taps into emotional insecurity as if it’s the key to an abstract plane of transcendence, and the album’s title becomes an invitation to embrace your humanity in an age when pocket technology can catalogue and manage your existence. Coupled with their corresponding lyrics, the songs provide soundscapes that are evocative of meeting points between mythology, fairy tale, and science fiction. Standing on the enchanting foundation of instrumentals that Stelmanis, Postepski, and Wolf unpack like pixies helping cherry blossoms unfold, the album can transport you at one moment to a sun speckled clearing in a dense and towering forest, and next to the throbbing recesses of a booming nightclub deep in the heart of a metropolis.

On the forlorn “Lose It,” fragile sadness is transformed into an entirely different animal by Stelmanis’s gorgeous vocals; closing piano ballad “The Beast” is downright triumphant; and – when it’s played on the right set of speakers – the slow boiling house throb of “Beat and the Pulse” will start the most inhibition obliterating of all dance parties. Stelmanis shrugs the latter’s chorus (and the album’s namesake) with the Zen instruction of a mystic: “Feel it break./ Nothing’s a mistake” – it just is.

Embarking on an ambitious tour in support of the record, the band further emphasized the liberating side of its creative vision through its live performances. Backed by a touring band that enlisted keyboardist Ryan Wonsiak (Ze, Boyfriends) and twin sisters Sari and Romy Lightman (both of Tasseomancy), Austra turned every night of its tour into a party, and audiences responded in kind.

Even critics wanted to take Austra’s advice and feel it break. After the band released the album, the Toronto Star and New York Magazine both responded by ranking the debut first in their lists of the top albums of 2011. Feel It Break received a Juno nomination for Electronic Album of the Year, and after just a month of time to work its way into public consciousness, the record was longlisted and then shortlisted for that year’s Polaris Music Prize.

Still, the only reference point people had going into their first live Austra performances were the colder, computer-programmed sounds of the record.

To better focus on Austra, Postepski left Trust around the time of that group’s 2012 debut, TRST, and the band set to work on an album that would translate more naturally to the stage. Instead of the mechanically regulated environs committed to wax on Feel It Break, the band recorded 2013 follow-up Olympia live, using analog instruments in a remote studio. If the band’s debut was about feeling disconnection, Olympia was about feeling things come together. The live approach to recording resulted in an overall warmer record that still showcased the existential suffering found on the band’s premiere, but Austra needed the bedroom introspection of Feel It Break to get there.

Tom Beedham is a writer living in Toronto. He's on Twitter.