Odonis Odonis - Post Plague

Pitchfork 79

On its 2011 debut full-length Hollandaze, Toronto trio Odonis Odonis crafted a rowdy blend of surf/garage and noise, only to dial-down the surf and crank up the noise on the 2014 follow-up Hard Boiled Soft Boiled. At that point it became apparent that Odonis Odonis had a penchant for sweeping change from album to album. But with Post Plague Odonis Odonis take an even more radical step in a new direction, dropping the noise element almost entirely and a re-fashioning themselves as a goth/industrial-styled synth outfit.

If your town has a goth hotspot where people like to twirl to classics by Dead Can Dance, Depeche Mode, etc, you’ll immediately have a sense for the era this album’s insistent synth gurgles and throbbing beats come from. The pulsating, John Carpenter-esque synth pattern that opens the song “Needs” recalls Carpenter’s score for his iconic 1981 film Escape from New York—a motif that has by now been mined to death by other bands. Odonis Odonis, however, aren’t invoking sci-fi as kitsch B-grade entertainment but as a dire reminder of the downside of unchecked technological progress. An official statement from the band implores the audience to “take stock of ourselves before we lose something profound, [which] may be necessary to ward off a pending anthropogenic apocalypse.”

Of course, sci-fi has a long history as an expression of collective anxieties about humanity’s future vis-a-vis technological advancement. But Post Plague's authoritative tone makes it resonate more profoundly than superficially similar music by Odonis Odonis' more fashion-conscious peers. Vocalist/synth player Constantin (Dean) Tzenos sings with the conviction of someone who's absolutely certain the world is on the brink of upheaval, but even when he's screaming he foregoes hysteria.

At times, such as on “Nervous,” he chooses to couch his message in reassurance and breathy sex appeal. Tzenos' reserved cool makes for a taut contrast between the music and the lyrics and actually heightens the urgency of the subject matter. He also wrings meaning out of terse, almost monosyllabic lines: “Now fear is cultured from within,” he sings on album opener “Fearless,” whose chorus is built on repetition of a basic two-word line: “Barely conscious/Barely conscious/We’re fearless.” Here and elsewhere, Tzenos says quite a lot with very little, and the implications of these ideas—in this case, emotional suppression and self-narcotizing through media—belie the simplicity of his word construction.

Unsurprisingly, traces of the band’s taste for noise linger. Staccato bursts of Ministry-style guitar/drums strafe across the otherwise hypnotically subdued synth lines on “Nervous,” for example. But, like most of the album, the song teeters at the edge of an eruption but pulls back before going over the edge. Here and throughout Post Plague, the band shows that it has learned the power of holding back. “Nervous” ends with a central synth figure getting the last word with the steady insistence of a vital signs monitor—a fitting metaphor for the resilience of the human spirit in spite of everything we’ve done to dehumanize ourselves. The music suggests over and overthat that resilience is on shaky ground, which sets Post Plague apart from its influences. We could once enjoy dystopian fantasy from a distance; Post-Plague isn't fantasy at all, and its themes are very much rooted in the now.

Occasionally, the band hints at its true range. Post Plague, in fact, falls within prescribed boundaries not because of limitations but by choice. Deeper into the track listing, the spartan, decidedly modern indie rock of “Pencils,” with its splashes of color and guest vocals courtesy of New Pornographers member Kathryn Calder, shows that, creatively speaking, even though this band might like to visit goth night from time to time, it wears no allegiance on its sleeve. Given Odonis Odonis’ track record, Post Plague is just another stop on an increasingly adventurous course through the genre map.