The lead single, “Home,” from Toronto-based Austra’s sophomore album Olympia is an aching and concentrated piano-driven piece of pop music melodrama, with lead vocalist Katie Stelmanis lamenting, “You know that it hurts me when you don’t come home at night.” It’s both rare and refreshing to hear such a direct and bullshit-free lyric, and this record is loaded with them, like on the pulsating “Forgive Me,” where Stelmanis repeats, “What do I have to do to make you forgive me?” Olympia quite successfully fuses layers and layers of snips, snaps and electro slaps with Stelmanis’ bizarre and beautiful vocals. It’s distinctive. It’s avant-garde. It’s confident. And similar to labelmates Junior...

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It niggles a bit. Here it is, 13 years into a new century, and Sigur Rós, one of the most revolutionary forces of the aural cause are, well, releasing an…album. OK, perhaps it was too much to hope that they would transcend all banal notions of the music-go-round by, say, founding their own religion or nation state. That said, the curious dichotomy of Sigur Rós has been that their life-altering live performances often seemed more akin to the ZOSO mysticism of Led Zeppelin than the enveloping enigma of their own recorded output. So that Kveikur opener “Brennisteinn” sounds for everything like Jimmy Page’s fantasy of My Bloody Valentine, and is then followed by the Eastern, Physical Graffiti...

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