These sparkly post-gazers first caught my attention just over a year ago with their debut mini album Sin4tr4 on Golden Morning Sounds. Now with Immortal Frost Productions they have expanded upon their lush and sometimes fragile soundscapes to bring out a full length album. I did find this very familiar and realised that amongst the ten numbers here a couple had been on their first release but why not as they were both instantly memorable and fit in very nicely with the other newer numbers.
Thankfully they have come up with a much better album title this time around and the first thing I noticed was again that all the songs were very much to the point one word titles. Compositionally the band are very much like this as well and the ten songs here are somewhat cut of any fat, lasting at a playing time of just 35 minutes in length. This is a bit of a fresh approach as many bands like this would take the opposite direction and let their instrumental jams stretch to at least a side of an album or even just have one elongated throughout the whole running time. The post rock sound here does equally embrace shoe-gazing parts but there is plenty to get your teeth into as the rugged drumming on opener ‘Aorta’ proves. It is not solely instrumental either we discover on this opener as babbling female vocals harmoniously albeit momentarily and without forming actual words accentuate the musicians towards conclusion. ‘Vostock’ has a real heavy feel to it too and although guitars can seep in and glisten and glint with some rather gorgeous acoustic parts when everything layers up there is an undeniable weight about things.
As I said before I do at times find myself waiting and expecting more in the way of vocals and there are parts here that remind me of bands like Alcest, the opening tones of older track ‘Antenna’ in particular, but then with ‘Zero’ we are back in a post punk and Gothic refrain that has me thinking the song would perhaps be more suited to the wails of Robert Smith than Neige. Still it is the instrumentation that we are left to embrace here and it sparkles admirably without any vocals really necessary. This is not a style that I listen to that often but it is one that is easy to get comfortable with and numbers like ‘Aura’ take me right back to the past with a hefty electronic and even John Carpenter-esque film noir feel about them. This track does surprise by having some more defined female vocals in it too reminding of a cross between Portishead, The Gathering and The Creatures. Elsewhere the more recent fusion of sounds one may find with Latitudes, Bossk and Junius are all fused together, the epic tones and fantastic melody of ‘Volume’ as title suggests being particularly impressive.
All in all this is a short, sublime and sweet listening experience with lots of mood and emotion running through it. Looking back at my past review Australasia have obviously grown on me as this one gets an extra mark from the debut and in the future there is no reason they won’t expand upon this too.
(7/10 Pete Woods)
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