Members of Austra
The latest edition of my Polaris People column is online over at the Polaris Music Prize website.
This time we investigate Austra‘s new video, look over the coverage of Colin Stetson‘s new album and mourn the (maybe) loss of Drake’s fancy automobile.
To read the column, go here.
Filed under Music, Shameless Promotion
Austra
Electro dance goths Austra have a secret ace in their hole — singer Katie Stelmanis has some opera training. Which she basically uses to help bring her melodramatic beats and pulses to the public.
She told me all about her opera connection in an interview for Spinner.
To read it click here.
Filed under Music, Shameless Promotion
Florence of the Machine and Katie Stelmanis of Austra
It’s World Goth Day.
Because we enjoy darkness we enlisted Encyclopedia Gothica author Liisa Ladouceur to answer the question “How goth is X?” about a bunch of bands.
Among them: Paramore, Skrillex, Austra, Florence And The Machine and Crystal Castles.
To read the article head over to Spinner by clicking here.
Filed under Culture, Music, Shameless Promotion
Austra photo courtesy Polaris Music Prize.
The latest edition of the Polaris Music Prize weekly news roundup is now online.
There are tenuous Dan Mangan connections, bad Austra jokes, and an update on Holy Fuck‘s Brian Borcherdt.
Go read the story over at Polaris Music Prize by clicking here.
Filed under Music, Shameless Promotion
Timber Timbre
This is my official Top 10 album list for 2011:
1. Timber Timbre Creep On Creepin’ On
“Black Water” was my most listened to song this year. Not sure what that says about me.
2. PJ Harvey Let England Shake
It took me awhile to “get” Let England Shake. The song that did it was “In Dark Places.”
3. Chad VanGaalen Diaper Island
If you told me at the start of the year that CVG would create my third-most favourite album of 2011 I’d have eaten my shoe. It’s a good thing I don’t hang around with fortune tellers. This is “Blonde Hash”
4. Austra Feel It Break
Everybody’s all about Austra’s electro-dance-witch-goth vibe. I’m on it, too, but the song on this album that really got me was the spooky piano ballad “The Beast.”
5. Lykke Li Wounded Rhymes
“I Follow Rivers” is heavy.
6. Young Galaxy Shapeshifting
This album was a bold experiment and it completely worked. This is “Peripheral Visionairies”
7. Herpes Symptome und Beschwerden
This is the exact real world manifestation of what I believe the nihilists from The Big Lebowski would sound like. I understand absolutely none of what’s being said in “Das Karnickel im Hut.”
8. D-Sisive Run With The Creeps
The more caustic, outsider and marginalized D-Sisive gets, the more pointed his music becomes. P.S. I found that GG Allin doll, D!
9. Raphael Saadiq Stone Rollin’
There are at least three songs on this record that are genuinely magic. “Movin’ Down The Line (Don’t You Go Away)” is one of them.
10. Destroyer Kaputt
This one’s a personal shocker because I’ve always hated Dan Bejar until this album. I appreciated the audacity of a yacht rock almost-concept record, though. And “Chinatown” is pretty groovy.
