On the surface, this Austra song is just a propulsive electronic jammer with ghostly vocals floating over the top. Been done, right? But there are little bits that make this worth coming back to again: the way the synths start to evaporate and shift and get fuzzy and warped, the way the vocals by Katie Stelmanis, who is the main force behind Austra, fall back and become part of the texture of the whole thing. It's worth spending a little time with. "The Beat and the Pulse" comes from a 12-inch that will be out on One Big Silence Records, the label run by Mike Haliechuk of Fucked Up.
Download: Austra, "The Beat and the Pulse"
