AMAARA wields galactic beauty and grasping potential on Child of Venus

Fortunately for AMAARA, it’s their debut and their potential gets its first spotlight. Led by vocalist and writer Kaelen Ohm, AMAARA is best placed between The Weather Station and Julia Holter on the art-pop spectrum, emanating surreal, analogue beauty polished to a mirror shine. However, like a mirror, Child of Venus is a debut that reflects existing material rather than its own creation.

Album opener and title track “Child of Venus” fairly judges its parent album and relays what it sees as a summary: a slow start that mistakes needless repetition for growing tension, a euphoric second half that never reaches a fever pitch, and a vocal presence afraid of flexing its muscles. As this formula is repeated and subverted, less is discovered about Ohm than one would hope, but their attempts at stringing together solid melodies and instrumental rushes during the hooks are admirable even if they fall into genre convention.

The tracklist may be a glorified trial-and-error display, with hits and misses abound, but even the most meagre tracks boast a strong instrumental palette. Synths radiate and dissipate like temperamental ocean waves, percussion pings in the mix like a spaghetti western gunfight. When harmonies arrive for bridges and choruses, the listener is washed over and left reeling. While “New Love’s Mortal Coil” and “Bright Lights” attempt a propulsive beat and casually run in place, it’s the delicate moments such as “Still” and “Photographs” that make the most out of this elegiac sound play.

Those latter two tracks resemble the closest thing AMAARA has to a signature sound, despite their vast cosmos of differences. “Still” is patent proof that a decent tune shouldn’t be the victim of pursuing aesthetics; they inform each other, making instrumental growth organic and captivating. Its swirling snare drum and tidal harmonies belong with a hook as resolutely simple as “Am I still yours?” When AMAARA pushes the listener along to the next track like a tour guide at an art museum, one wonders why we couldn’t have more time to appreciate their shining moments before being left next to the gift shop: one that looks like every other gift shop.

“Photographs” is AMAARA’s most surreal and enthralling track of their career, a gorgeously expansive and unsettling acoustic cut that sidesteps the long-road-to-nowhere error of the tracklist by maximizing its production value to the point of bewilderment. There’s a distant hum and electric crackle that makes a moment of haunting recollection visceral and immediate. Within a set of sister songs honed into no particular direction of their own, running into familiar album pacing tropes, these two tracks are the flag I plant and beg of them to see upheld. Child of Venus isn’t just a record of galactic beauty and grasping potential, but also of rare brushes with a future where they finally reach it.