It’s also Topical Canadian References Day, apparently…
[Video][Website]
[5.77]
Mallory O’Donnell: Not unlovely minimal middle-ages indietronica track that ratchets up the cool, breezy late-night beach jam feel as gradually as it abandons the stern-faced fronting and dull key-jabbing that haunts the first portion. Sadly, whatever interesting land of Lord Dunsany-watches-Rave-from-nearby-hillside this all might have been heading toward is sharply derailed by Stevie Nicks being captured and then cruelly squeezed by a giant pair of tweezers.
[4]
Alfred Soto: The quasi-operatic introduction is a horrorshow from which the song doesn’t fully recover, despite the house piano, woodwinds, and Austra’s switching registers. I’d love Todd Terje or Lindstrøm to sample the beat.
[6]
Iain Mew: When is a house piano loop not a house piano loop? When it alternates with a severe march and a tale of woe that definitely doesn’t want to dance. The loop is incongruous but lights up “Home” regardless, a welcome expansion to Austra’s sound that doesn’t lose what made their intense synth-pop appeal to begin with.
[8]
Will Adams: “Home” hops between two zones: click house with a funky bassline and plodding balladry with warbling from Katie Stelmanis. While the outro settles on the former, the moments of dirge drag it down.
[5]
Katherine St Asaph: Austra moving toward house was probably inevitable; fittingly, this only works once they go the full Disclosure and let their piano loop mourn, not plod.
[7]
Alex Ostroff: A promising direction for Austra, but amidst all of the tricks borrowed from house, the “release” part of “build and release” has yet to be fully integrated.
[7]
Ian Mathers: This is torch song as Hegelian thesis/antithesis/synthesis, particularly the middle section where the song almost seems to be disassembling Katie Stelmanis’s typically fine opening refrain. It seems digressive until everything comes back together, stronger, at the three minute mark — tellingly, the moment in the video where the on-screen Stelmanis starts singing along. The structure may just seem formally interesting the first time through; but married with lyrics and a performance that centers on the moment when the ostensible discussion (“sure I have a plausible reason I wasn’t home”) shifts to the real, emotional one (“you know how it makes me feel”), the result is quietly moving.
[8]
Anthony Easton: Douglas Sirk-style emotional disregulation and obsessive desire for the domestic results in everything sort of falling apart. The collapse could have been more politically interesting.
[4]
Brad Shoup: I’m mainly interested in the flute/brass arrangement, trucked in from an ambitious cop show. Austra dabs at the vaguely funky track with vibrato-riddled fragments and accusations, but I really just wanna hear some instruments trill.
[5]
Patrick St. Michel: I preferred the not-overproduced version of “Vanessa.”
[4]
Jer Fairall: A faint electronic pulse tries to play cool, but the instrumentation and especially the vocals are histrionic, overstated and ostentatious. Isn’t Toronto dealing with enough drama at the moment?
[3]
Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: At first, “Home” recalls CocoRosie’s performance-heavy indie with Katie Stelmanis’s piano and emotional vocals, but then it shuffles into life and away from drama-queen stasis. A pernickety percussive undercurrent is covered by rumbling basslines, house piano and woodwind trills(!!!) The only thing anchoring its end to its beginning is Stelmanis’s vocals, which may be an acquired taste but help “Home” to defy expectations.
[7]
Daisy Le Merrer: According to Katie Stelmanis, she used to present her band with fully fleshed demos. But she’s changed her approach on Home which was built as a band in the studio, and it shows. She starts things off alone with her piano and stays in full desperate tremolo mode throughout the song, but the band wanders far from their usual icy territories. It doesn’t really make sense to me why I still like this, so I’ll try putting it in Mario Kart terms: it’s like playing Rosalina on a jungle course. She looks out of place, but who cares if she still finishes first?
[7]