Austra – Olympia

Kate Stelmanis is a classically trained former opera singer but on album number two, Olympia, her voice imparts drama for its very lack of rhapsody. It’s beautiful, for sure, but most effective on the moments in which she sounds most detached. On the mechanical opening track What We Done?, her Nico-esque delivery is matched by the numbness of the lyrics. “So I dance for nothing,” the haunting chorus line, could well have been sung from a frozen corner of Red Square in 1983.

Olympia belongs to that school of electronica that, on the face of it, could fill dancefloors across the country, but dig a little deeper and there’s inescapable darkness and sadness (Ladytron and, to a lesser extent, the Knife come to mind). It would be remiss to credit Stelmanis’ voice alone: the depth and emotional pull of the production here is exceptional, the entrance of the organ on ‘Home’, and hint of glockenspiel on Fire, sublime.