A-
83%
Katie Stelmanis
Us
Blocks
There’s something inexplicably endearing about a classically trained vocalist who can appreciate the distorted, gritty sounds produced by a cheap keyboard. But with a musical history that includes singing in the Canadian Children’s Opera Choir and a stint in the late-’90s girl group, Galaxy, Katie Stelmanis isn’t your average former opera singer.
On her debut solo album Us, Stelmanis pairs a strong, smooth voice with a pseudo-industrial-sounding combination of synthetic beats for a series of incongruous but oddly soothing numbers. Though Stelmanis could be accused of repeating herself from song to song, the unexpected switches from mournful, minimalist vocals to harsh percussion and manufactured noise on tracks such as “I’m sick” disarm the listener and call for introspection.
The album culminates with a cover of Aretha Franklin’s 1967 hit “(You Make Me Feel Like A) Natural Woman,” made famous more recently by the illustrious Whitney Houston.
While I’m still inclined to feel a little nauseated if I think too hard about the lyrics, the sheer magnitude of Stelmanis’ unconventional, synthetic sounds makes me wonder if there isn’t something deeper and more playful to the song that Houston missed.
On all but the last track, the lyrics are intermittently obscured by grandiose arrangements and, according to Stelmanis, change with almost every live performance. But in the same way I can appreciate an opera despite its being sung in a 17th-century Germanic dialect, the language Stelmanis uses does nothing to diminish the depth of her songs. The strings of sentence fragments and often indiscernible, somber chanting of lyrics only add to Stelmanis’ mystery.
—Erin Flegg
B-
70%
Kelley Polar
I Need You To Hold On While The Sky Is Falling
Environ
I’m not too proud to it that I only picked up Kelley Polar’s latest album for two very superficial reasons: the cover, reminiscent of an art deco paint-by-numbers, and the title, which struck me as kind of poetic.
Knowing nothing about the artist I assumed it would be just another indie rock album—I don’t mean this pejoratively, but I’ve seen enough of indie albums to recognize that an aesthetically appealing cover and mildly pretentious title generally signal something twee. But when I put the album on, I was surprised by the sound. Kelley Polar sounds like a refugee of ’80s synth on a mission to create electronic pop for a new generation.
The album opens with an extremely annoying intro song “A Feeling of the All-Things,” in which Polar employs some repetitive Mr. Roboto vocal styling, seemingly designed to get the listener to turn off the album without even making it to the second track. But if you can get through the first song, the synth beats and original melodic vocal lines prove unexpectedly catchy. Lyrically, the songs don’t really go anywhere and often consist of a couple of phrases repeated over and over, but this is really secondary to Polar’s ability to make electro pop sound fresh some 25 years past its prime.
“Entropy Reigns” could easily be a New Order song, but Polar uses a repeated violin sample that you can’t help but move to when you hear it.
I don’t know if it’ll make my normal rotation, but I Need You To Hold On While The Sky Is Falling is a neat little album with nostalgic feel that still sounds modern enough to be played in a club today.
—Tekla Nagel
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