Olympia has been tipped as Austra's "dance album," though the Toronto band's debut, Feel It Break, contained enough club-worthy material: the arpeggiating likes of "Beat and the Pulse", and B-sides "Energy" and "Young and Gay" much more so. Its remixes came off less like mandatory singles life extensions than a glimpse into what these gothy tracks got up to after the witching hour. On Olympia, the main change from Feel It Break isn't adding beats but adding more in general: the core trio doubled to a six-piece, bringing more layers to Katie Stelmanis' songwriting, and pushing it in a more house-inspired synth-pop direction.
It's an obvious-seeming move these days, but Austra was close enough to this sound previously that it's not too jarring a development. Plus, they push in that direction with an unusual sonic palette: sparkly harp solos, deadpan early-Knife riffs, vocals that sound druidic, even guttural, including New Age-evoking morose choral drones. Much continues to be made of Stelmanis's opera training, but opera's just about the only sound that isn't represented here. It takes a while to get familiar with these sounds, which seems deliberate. "You'll never know me, I'll never know you," as Stelmanis sings on "Sleep", outright repudiating the notion of instant dancefloor connection.
Stelmanis' solo work would turn single lines-- "be your own company," "join us"-- into manifestos, a tendency for studies on a single riff that carried through into Feel It Break. Olympia sounds far more expansive and a little less removed-- "We Become" even grooves. Though opener "What We Done?" has the bass throb and synth counterpoint of a late-night dance hit, it doesn't do much else, and vocalist Katie Stelmanis sings her melody as if what she's hearing is a requiem. "Annie (Oh Muse, You)", the noisiest, synth-clappingest track here, mutters where there might have been melodies. Lead single "Home" is built on a house piano riff any of today's revivalists would envy, but it takes its sweet time getting there.
Stelmanis has said she listened to a lot of early Cat Power while recording Olympia, and while nothing here sounds anywhere near as stark, the lyrics often do, and lead appropriately tense, nervy sounding songs. There are still hints of Feel It Break's aesthetic-heavy mysticism, but in general, Olympia is an album where a title like "You Changed My Life" is the sort to be delivered over sincere piano. (Over a low-end-heavy chug, but still.) "Forgive Me", a plea to an estranged lover or friend, is blunt both lyrically ("What do I have to do to make you forgive me?") and musically: obsessive, pinprick-tense, desperate for closure. "Home" has a similar centerpiece-- "you know that it hurts me when you don't come home at night"-- and the arrangement sounds like the feverish, sleepless worry that accompanies.
Much of Olympia is disarmingly personal, and some, as usual with Austra, is political-- but not the stuff of Stelmanis and drummer Maya Postepski's previous riot grrl band Galaxy, nor the cinemascope revolution of Shaking the Habitual (another cited inspiration) but something subtler. Throughout Olympia, love is a radical act and heartbreak-- in greater supply here-- a failure of community; but the album doesn’t speak in those abstractions. “Painful Like” addresses bigotry, specifically anti-gay (“We don’t have to marry…. In this town we’ll bury all the minds that clench too tight”), but makes its point through quick flashes of detail (“bruised skin on top of mine”), a startling, candid sort of intimacy Olympia’s remaining tracks grasp for.
Later on comes the album's centerpiece "I Don't Care (I'm a Man)", the most fuck-off title Austra's ever written, but the track has no dramatics, just a coolly dispassionate gaze. Stelmanis plays something between a satisfied troll and a coroner surveying the third crime scene of the day, monotone while detailing "the whimper in her sigh, the softer brutalizing-- but I don't care, I'm a man." It barely lasts a minute, as if about to break into something more bracing; but the group's going not for shock but shrug value, the sort that gets disturbing once you process what you've just heard. This, it turns out, might be Austra's greatest strength.
