Aurat
Silhouette
Get Better Records
Recent releases from Los Angeles’ Aurat have been pursuing a more electronic sound, which while not divorced from the band’s post-punk and goth rock roots, were informed just as much by body music and synthpunk. It’s surprising then that their new LP Silhouette swerves back in the other direction, with big chunky distorted guitar riff and thumping rock drums. And while it certainly does recall some of the material of their excellent 2020 album Zeher, it’s basically a brand new sound from a band who have proven to be extremely hard to pin down.
A song like “Shadow” should give you a proper taste of what the quartet are working with; squalling guitar textures that resolve into atonal riffing and chugging, primal thumping drumming, and the powerful voice of Azeka Kamal, howling and crying her way through the chaos. To be frank, it’s got a lot more in common with any number of shoegazy 90’s alt rock acts than it does anything under the broader darkwave umbrella, but with that in mind it’s a sound that the band have dialed in cleanly. They take it to the dreamy end of clamourous guitar noise on the lovely “Zuris Lullaby” where the reverb hangs heavily like a shroud over the mid-tempo rolling drums, and dive deep into dirgey downtuned sludge on opener “Chaos Fades”, which splits the difference between sounding both mournful and outraged.
It’s not like the band have completely abandoned electronics though, although they’re being applied tactically and are often obscured or entirely absent. You can hear a touch on the dubby drumbreak that pushes “Arzu” along, a touch of trip-hop to back up the strummy guitars and effects pedal shimmer. The same drumloop engine lives in the downright catchy “Dreadful Game”, which is as close to a catchy crossover rock song as the band have ever been, featuring a sweet and nuanced vocal from Kamal, sounding distant and yet somehow strangely familiar. When the band do dig in deeper into synths and drum programming on closer “leadtothefire”, it’s striking because they maintain the same textural elements as the rock-oriented numbers, all wide echoes and distorted melodies, warped by the gravitational pull of the reverb. It’s yet another change-up from a band who have made a virtue of doing just that, their unexpected deep dive into a whole new sound revealing yet another facet of their broad but focused musical approach.
