Austra
★★★★★
Chin Up Buttercup
DOMINO. CD/DL/LP
Katie Austra Stelmanis’s Madonna-influenced break-up album.
Austra albums typically look for outside inspiration. 2017’s Future Politics, for example, leant on the essay Inventing The Future: Post-Capitalism And A World Without Work. The arena of conflict firing her fifth is more personal: Austra’s lover suddenly announced her unhappiness, and vanished the very next day. “My life is not the same without you,” the opening Amnesia grieves, though the solemn mood soon shifts to trippy euphoria, underlining the LP’s acknowledged debt to Madonna’s Ray Of Light. Chin Up Buttercup still sets its own agenda, elevated by Austra’s opera-trained vocal, thrilling fluctuations (Blindsided veers from skeletal to symphonic) and emotional candour. “You say I needed my own friends/ Then you fucked them” (the New Order throb of Math Equation) confirms she’s progressed from grief to anger, and with serene finale Good Riddance, acceptance.