Austra, The Earl, Atlanta

Last concert of Rocktober 2011, and the fifth one of this week alone.  By my count, I've seen 49 different bands since September 20th (counting two separate performances at different venues by Yellow Ostrich as two, not one, act), not including all of those hard-working and deserving but largely anonymous bands working the various stages at the East Atlanta Strut and L5P Halloween Parade.  Tomorrow is Halloween - time to finally conclude Rocktober and get back on with my so-called life.

One of the themes that's run through this series of concerts has been bands dominated by powerful female singers, from Glasser back on September 20th, and continuing on through Thao, Wye Oak, Zola Jesus, Saint Vincent, and Atlanta's Featureless Ghost.  Many of these bands, particularly Glasser and Zola Jesus, set the warmth and femininity of their vocals against colder electronic instrumentation.  Tonight's show, featuring artists Austra and Grimes, continued that trend,and may have been one of the best shows of Rocktober.

Pictures soon.

The opening act this evening was Black Lodge, an Atlanta band named for that extradimensional epicenter of evil in Twin Peaks, who provided a goth variation on the theme.  The quartet features two bassists, keyboards and drums.  They're a new band and looked quite, quite young as they employed ominous synth lines and deep, minimalistic bass for a sound that helps the band live up to the gloomy connotations of its name.  Do I even need to even tell you that they all dressed in black?  Did I mention tomorrow is Halloween?

Grimes, the avant-pop solo project of Montreal singer, keyboardist, and artist Claire Boucher, is on tour with Austra and followed Black Lodge.

Grimes draws upon a diverse collection of influences as she experiments with loops and a stratospheric falsetto (she says she listened to Mariah Carey's Heartbreaker to learn how to sing over four octaves).  She performed solo, except for a dancer (Duffy) who worked the crowd.  But the dance beat was the driving force in her music, and just because she works in a pop format doesn't mean she has to stop being interesting and intelligent.  There's an eerie, supernatural undercurrent to her songs and the moody instrumentation surrounding them.

Like Zola Jesus, Katie Stelmanis, co-founder and lead singer of Toronto's Austra, had studied as an opera singer before migrating to rock. She took piano and violin lessons and, as a child, sang with the Canadian Opera Company. Later, after years of private lessons, she was set to study opera in college, but deep down inside, Ms. Stelmanis says she knew she didn’t want to move to Montreal but stay in Toronto and make "classical music with really fucked up, distorted, crazy shit on there." This realization eventually led her to abandon school, discover electronica, and form Austra, which now includes Dorian Wolf on bass and Maya Postepski on percussion.

The songs are guided by Stelmanis' haunting voice and orchestrated entirely with sleek analog synths. It's a throbbing, beat-heavy mix of stylish, emotionally remote synth-pop that's both unsettling and alluring, but always danceable.

Tonight, her operatic background was evident in the intensity and strength of her singing.  There's a point somewhere around the 2:45 minute mark in her song The Beat and the Pulse where her voice goes into a sort of overdrive.  In concert, she spent most of her time singing with that kind of intensity, and actually seemed to have to hold herself back during the earlier part of the song for dramatic effect before she returned to her normal stride.  She was that good.