Over the past decade, the Melbourne group’s music has grown lighter, gentler, and more inviting with every release. Here, they trade their minimal-wave roots for unexpected forays into gothic country.
Melbourne’s HTRK (pronounced “Hate Rock”) have spent a decade ruminating in the shadows of loss. After the deaths of mentor, producer, and Birthday Party member Rowland S. Howard, in 2009, and their founding bassist, Sean Stewart, in 2010, the surviving duo reconfigured its industrial no-wave detachment into an intimate blend of elegiac synth music, slowcore rhythms, and flushed-cheek vocals. Still throbbing with sadness, their dramatically layered sound has grown lighter, gentler, and more inviting with each release. It’s now so sparse, you could almost hear a pin drop amid the amplifier hum. On Rhinestones, HTRK peel back even more layers, further revealing the fragile heart at the center of their music. Vocalist Jonnine Standish’s wispy poetry drapes over ephemeral textures as if she’s whispering a devastating secret in the form of a lullaby. The album plays like a heartbreaking country ballad’s matte-black underside, capturing the desperate solitude of a freshly bruised heart.
Standish and guitarist Nigel Yang resemble a subterranean Everything But the Girl, with Standish patiently spilling gorgeous vocal half-hooks over minimal acoustic guitar, electric delay, and dimly lit textures. Opener “Kiss Kiss and Rhinestones” stirs its country tropes into a blurred-out dream state. Standish’s peculiar poetry draws us in closer as she plays the word “glitter” three ways: “I can make you glitter/I can make you feel glitter than this/Kiss kiss and rhinestones/I’m covered in glitter/From head to toe,” she coos over dewy acoustic strumming. The music recalls the goth-country twang of Townes Van Zandt, decorated with steel-string flourishes that sound like Lindsey Buckingham hammer-and-pulling himself to sleep. Using barely audible synth and vocal layering, they craft an entire universe of sound while simultaneously capturing the feeling of being completely alone in a dark, empty room. The track’s sophisticated subtlety merges with its lo-fi desolation, vivid textures echoing off the walls. HTRK’s music is deceptively prickly; its glittering gemstones adorn deeper emotional wounds.
The album sequences its heavy-hearted vignettes over a brisk 27 minutes that weigh heavier than the sum of their parts, as Standish and Yang soundtrack the confusion of being drawn to that which may eventually cause you harm, or perhaps already has. The songs’ tender tones and blurred edges capture both sensual intimacy and lurking violence. “Valentina” features blossoming acoustic fingerpicking paired with murky electric guitar swells as Standish recalls, “I saw petals fall on my bed/A familiar thorn in my head/Can you remove it from my finger?” The song neatly describes the record’s fundamental ambivalence, caught between the allure of enigmatic beauty and the discomfort of emotional turmoil.
Rhinestones is infatuated with ennui’s disorienting dazzle, and the tragic discovery of what lies behind its knotty, ornamental gates. On “Fast Friends,” Standish comes to terms with the catalytic spark of an instant bond with a new, emotionally unstable friend: “What a house on fire/Crossed electric wire/A bat out of hell/With so many meltdowns/Just makes you seem interesting.” That revelation captures the spirit of the entire record. Rhinestones evokes the mystifying chaos of yearning to know the unknowable and the fool’s errand of trying to love the unlovable. Though it might first seem a worthy, almost admirable task, the duo suggests, in the end, you only wind up breaking your own heart.
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