Number 3 of 2004 — Ayria: Debris

When you first hear an album, you tend to get a feeling as to whether it’s a great album. As you listening to it more, you become more aware as to what gives it quality. The majority of my favourite albums fit into this pattern. However, Ayria’s Debris doesn’t. First time around, it made my shrug my shoulders, and think “hmm.. nice. Well made. But nothing special. Still, it’s worth a listen.”

But then came the rest of 2004, giving me many opportunities to listen to Debris in different states of mind, in different places. And it consumed me. I haven’t listened to this album for a little while – being more content with listening to Ayria’s new one Flicker – but as I write this review it all comes back to me. Gosh this is good. Curiously, it has also provided me with a new perspective on Flicker.

Ayria’s main protagonist, Jennifer Parkin used to be in Epsilon Minus before striking out alone (ish) to do her own thing, working with Glis, Delobbo, Massiv In Mensch, Iris and DJ Ram/Virtual Server to produce this debut. EBM meets 21st century club music meets 1980s electronica.

A love of ambiguity. I’ll admit I’m not a fan of obvious lyrics. Nor am I a fan of not-ambiguous-enough lyrics. One of the reasons I adore Kristin Hersh and Tori Amos is that their lyrics can be as ambiguous or obvious as you want them to be, and the more you know them, the more you understand their songs. The inverse is also true.

You can take the songs on Debris at face value or read more into them. This depends on whether you believe these songs are autobiographical. Everyone has their dark side, their frustrations, anxieties, reasons for being angry, but Jenn also likes to express her thoughts about her world and her place in it. Now onto the music.

Debris is heavily influenced by the historical baggage of EBM. Fortunately, this isn’t all mid-eighties Front 242 (oh, and by the way, if you want to discover a truly awful web experience, visit their website), because Debris takes these elements and then draws them forward into breakbeat, house, classical, choral and trance. The underlying aim of almost all of the music is to provide the most basic backing possible to Jenn’s vocals.

For example, DOS mixes heavy EBM rhythms and electronics with a chorus that drives trance like, providing a contrast between the lyrics and the music. It’s this first track that introduces the listener to Jenn’s vocals and her thoughts. The later, magnificent Disease takes this style clubwards “A stabbing pain stuck in my side / Not sure why I adore you / A strangled chocking little cry / I would do all things for you”, and on both Substance and Start Again things go tranceward, almost reaching Delerium propositions. The vocals provide the core melodies for most of the songs on the album. This is a somewhat risky approach because it demands that the listener concentrate on the vocals, and any lyrical or musical error is made more obvious. Fortunately Jenn has an excellent variety in delivery, an ear for a good tune, and plenty of interesting ways to treat her vocals.

The radio filtered vocal intro of Had Something drops away to leave a minimal house backing, witness the drum loops and the string pad, leading away from the ambiguity of the opening tracks to something more personal and obvious “Everything you said is coming true / Everything that I disliked about you”. The confessions continue on Mercury, and for the first time blatently exposes the perfect match of her voice to the music, with its wavering eastern feel on the breaks between verses. I love Jenn’s voice in all of its incarnations, and it provides extraordinary beauty to the crunching noise that underpins the majority of songs. Despite this, never on this album does the music encumber the vocals, nor should it.

Radio is one of the most crushing heart-stopping songs of all time, but I’ve written about this before: “Pillow Panther-era Cranes, plus too many nights out dancing and minus the Black Sabbath obsession”, although perhaps I’m underselling it. Beta Complex is more electronica than the rest of the album, perhaps the only time where the vocals sit back from the track leaving the bleeps, pads and percussion to go out clubbing on their own: “Just leave me alone today / Because all I do causes so much pain”.

Overall this minimal approach is stunning. In Debris, the smallest change in hi-hats becomes important, and the simplest vocal riff ‘This fire / desire’ works wonders. The closing torch-song Kiss Me Goodnight As I’m Falling Asleep is lovely too. And I’m left wondering if the torch-song-as-closer will become a pattern in the future, because there’s one on Flicker too.

Debris pushes all the right buttons for me, in so many different ways that I find it strange I didn’t rate it that highly when I bought it. It is now firmly on my little list of albums I can’t live without.

Anyhow, it’s time for some links:

Ayria
Ayria MySpace
Kittenflug
Buy Debris
Buy Flicker