Austin Sound

It was, oh, around 1989, I guess. I was in a club in North London called the Slimelight, which was only open between 12AM and 6 AM, when the underground wasn’t running—so once you got there, you were kind of stuck there. It was a pretty lousy place—lousy in the sense of lice, I mean—with lots of speed, lots of hard cider, lots of hairspray, and lots of trashy music. The djs played a weird mixture of goth, punk and noise, with the occasional early new wave oddity thrown in, like Gina X (remember her?). Sleazy stuff, really—synths, bass, drums and murky vocals about suicide or bondage or drugs or something. It suited the atmosphere, I guess.

So, now it’s 2007, and I’m listening to Beyond The Reach Of The Satellite Feeds, the debut release by Sthil,—an Austin, TX duo with Jenn Leathers on vocals and Joel Willard on everything else—everything else being synths, bass, drums� you get the picture (the name stands for “Search The Heavens If Lost”). However, there’s nothing remotely sleazy about Sthil, despite the early-80’s electro-dance references in their sound. Jenn Leathers’s vocals recall Polly Harvey (and in places, Jarboe of the Swans) more than ‘ole Gina X, and the whole sound, although it would not have been out of place in a late-80’s North London shithole, is really somewhat akin to that of other local luminaries Many Birthdays or Octopus Project than it is to Berlin or Missing Persons. There’s really a cinematic quality to Sthil’s music: the opening cut, “Drizzle Dazzle,” despite its rudimentary drum programming and automated handclaps, has a sweep that’s remarkably, well, visual.

In fact, the whole record was originally written as the soundtrack to a “dystopian sci-fi musical,” and once the show was over, the two principle songsmiths stuck together. So, that makes this record something of a “concept album” . . . and therein lies the problem. It’s not that I have anything against dystopian sci-fi musicals—heck, I kind of feel as though I’m living in one right now—but the lyrics here are rather difficult to swallow. Really, not since Bowie’s Diamond Dogs has anyone been audacious enough to propose a lyric like the one for Sthil’s “Love Is Like Cancer” (is it, now?), or the obscure nightmare visions of “Days Of Nin” Such ideas might have worked well in a multi-media stage show, but stripped of such accompaniment, you might be left scratching your head.

But soaring above the attempts at narrative profundity, the rudimentary drum machine programming, and the only occasionally interesting synth-sounds is Jenn Leathers’s voice—a powerful, evocative instrument that is impossible to ignore or dismiss. When the sound of her pipes takes over, it doesn’t matter what she’s saying, only how she says it, and this gives us hope for Sthil’s future. They’ve begun something here, an attempt to update 80’s techno with contemporary theatricality, and they’ve come close to succeeding. Listen to this record if you want to hear what it sounds like for two talented people to start finding their sound, and to begin telling a story with it.

Websites:
http://sthil.net
Myspace