Review Summary: Shimmering and ephemeral, AURORA’s debut shows promise but lacks in personality.
I distinctly remember the first time I saw AURORA. It was at the SweetLife Festival out in Maryland. She emerged on the stage, her pale skin flushed out by the immense heat, and began one of the most enigmatically engrossing live sets I’ve seen in a while. Set against a tapestry of glitchy drum programming and sparkling synths, she twitched and shook in time with the music. Her fingers moved like a harpist’s as she danced barefoot around the stage. About 45 minutes into the hour long set, an image popped into my mind of another barefooted ingénue with an affinity for harps, and the thought irreparably colored my image of AURORA. I saw Florence Welch.
As I listened to “All My Demons Greeting Me As A Friend,” I couldn’t erase this image of Florence Welch from my head. And AURORA seemed hell-bent on reinforcing them at every turn here. Whether it’s the stomp-clap skyscraper of a song “Conqueror” or her siren vocals or her overreliance on mythical clichés and fierce devotion to the Tori Amos-Kate Bush playbook, AURORA’s debut is ultimately a master class in the execution of these stylistic elements.
One only needs to look at the tracklist to see what’s up here. You’ve got songs like “Running With The Wolves,” “Winter Bird,” and “Black Water Lilies” on the regular version and, if you’re fancy enough to buy the deluxe edition, you get “Nature Boy” and “Wisdom Cries.” These tracks again roll through the Florence Welch Black Book of Lyrical Clichés with alarming efficiency, covering “human sacrifice as metaphor for love” (“Lucky”), drowning and water (“Under the Water”), and suicide (“Winter Bird”). The tracks themselves are written pretty well, and do right by their chosen themes and clichés. The production is less “Lungs” and more “Ceremonials,” with a splash of Ellie Goulding’s “Halcyon” (itself a half-assed attempt at F+TM maximalism) thrown in for spice.
AURORA herself is a pretty good vocalist, although she lacks the presence and personality of her contemporaries. Her particular brand of vocalization is equally indebted to Florence, Ellie, and Kate, but never shows the range or idiosyncrasies of any of them. The best example of this lack is on “I Went Too Far,” a song about longing and obsession that falls just below its potential. Its chorus needs more punch and the verses need more emotion and freedom. Too often across the project, AURORA’s vocals seem more restrained than they need to be. In a live setting, her loosened wails and tics give personality and depth to her performances. Sadly, they’re absent throughout this album, and the songs suffer for it.
All in all, this album is a fairly good debut from an artist that’s bound to blow up in some capacity soon. She definitely poses the ability to produce really good and engrossing songs (“Murder Song” and “Under the Water” will probably wiggle their ways onto a few critics’ top 10 or 50 lists of best songs). But despite boasting considerable talent, you just can’t shake the feeling that she’s building her house on someone else’s well-trodden land. I wrote in my review of Supercar’s “Futurama” that critical comparisons can often be lazy, but also serve the purpose of illuminating a particular cultural phenomenon. I’ll be the first to say that too many young female artists have been compared to Kate Bush or Tori Amos (pretty much any idiosyncratic female gets that rep). But AURORA is the first artist I’ve heard in a long while who doesn’t just flirt with these comparisons, but goes out of her way to invite them. She takes themes implicit to Bush’s music and makes them painfully explicit in a way that’s undeniable to almost anyone who’s listening. “Under the Water” takes “Under Ice”’s anxiety and turns it into an open and obvious couplet asking who’s below and what’s separating us and them. She takes “Between a Man and a Woman”’s vivid and compassionate description of marital discord and transposes it onto an overblown metaphor about compassionate murder (just guess the song). AURORA’s debut is capable and should appease fans of folky pop music that fits well into a Forever 21 playlist as well as those who fancy flighty mistresses obsessed with their own mortality, but she’s still got some growing to do if she wants to be more than just another name on the Influenced part of Kate Bush’s Wikipedia page.
