Metal Mother
Ionika
Post Primal Records
Street: 04.16
Metal Mother = Fever Ray + Austra + Claire Boucher
A project of Oakland native Taara Tati’s confident musicianship and dark-wave occultism, Metal Mother’s second album, Ionika, will surely make waves in that burgeoning ethereal-witchy-gothic-pop, post-Internet scene you either love or hate by now. Inspired by her Celtic ancestry, Druid fantasy and altpop sirens Björk and Kate Bush, Tati’s recorded an album full of magnificent, dark goth-pop tunes. “Mind_off” opens the album with Tati’s deft vocal maneuvers, pulsating synths that build up to moments of bombastic drum rhythms and anthemic choruses. I did double takes on some tracks though, like the Grimes-sounding “Hungers” and “Windexx’d,” which features pitch-bending vocals and tin drums in the style of Purity Ring. In “Omens,” Tati is a dead ringer for Karin Dreijer Andersson. But the magic in Metal Mother’s sound is not in its similarities, rather it’s in the album’s perfect production, its range of gothic darknesses and its avant-pop sensibilities. –Christian Schultz