- After listening to Alyrah’s new EP I’m not quite sure how to take her swirling, enveloping religious mysticism. She’s all veneration of Ishtar and igniting the twin flames of the goddess in your heart, which is a bit out of my wheelhouse so I’ll focus on a connection that I get more intuitively: fusing all this middle-eastern mysticism with delicious, dancey, electro-pop.

Sydney artist Alyrah brings an eclectic musical background to lift left-field bangers out of the ordinary and into something special. The ethereal dream-romance of sort-of-title-track, Twin Flame, is as good an example as any. The shimmering tremolos Alyrah performs grab you attention instantaneously; unintentionally reminiscent of the highly evocative Ghost In The Shell soundtrack. The production sound is, across the record, quite dense, full of close harmony and swathed in reverb - it’s an unusual but, as it turns out, very effective choice. This song’s burning hearts are given a very evocative vehicle to pronounce their love.

The dream-love continues on Emerald, but wow, what an unexpected bridge into the first chorus. It takes the bare bones electro and drowns it in a technicolour flood of synth and vocal harmony. It’s glorious, like watching a riot of flowers erupt out of a concrete pavement. The song lapses into a sweet but relaxed coda; guess you can’t stay at that level of intensity forever, but I kind of wish you could!

The lyrics of Twin Flame Portal tease the difference between romance and religious experience, across the record. You’re never quite sure whether you’re on your way to a romantic tete-a-tete or transcending physical reality. Slow-burner Peru makes it a bit more explicit as it moves from starry space rivers to a rendevous with ‘the master’. “I’m with the master in outer space / I am the master now / I am a master from out of space.” The music explodes into celebration again and it’s either a moment of mystical epiphany or, without wanting to be mean, an invitation to join a star-cult that I’m not sure I’d be in a rush to accept.

The beat of Ishtar is the most middle-eastern on the record - I think it’s a darbuka? Whatever it is, it’s a total winner and the number moves like it’s nobody’s business. The vocals are hushed but intense as the dance speeds on through four-and-a-half minutes, again speaking to that density of production sound I described earlier.  I was standoffish before, but if this is what a service sounds like at the temple of Ishtar, I think I might start attending. 

Final number Empress, in turn, has the best melody, soaring joyously through Alyrah’s vocal, atop a Frankenstein’s monster of a beat -part trap, part trance, part breaks- complete with ambient and jazzy flourishes. That’s a bit crazy, but Alyrah is a smart musician and makes all of these serve the music rather than the other way around. The lyrics are again making me a little nervous with references to spiritual unravelling that sound suspiciously like human sacrafice: “They’ve taken me apart now, they’ve taken me apart now / I realize I’m taken apart now that’s why I’m all alone.” I know I probably shouldn’t read it that way, but I guess I’m a bit gunshy with spiritual revelation.

On a purely musical level Twin Flame Portal is a libidinal rush. A dense, mysterious and energised shard of danceable electro-pop; it is absolutely unashamed to be thoroughly it’s own thing. For me it has echoes of some of my favourites in that sound, though I’ve no idea whether Alyrah has listened to such obscure powerhouses as Olga Bell or the shorted-lived but much admired KYÜ; they were from Sydney too, so maybe. There’s also a similarity to Dirty Projectors, from back when Amber Coffman was in the band and their sound reached apex poppiness.

You may have to be a full-fee paying disciple of Ishtar to get maximum value from this little EP and once or twice I think I was actually tempted, which, for a crusty old skeptic like myself, is a serious admission. However far you delve into the mysteries of her faith, it’s difficult to deny Alyrah as an unusual and unusually exciting new voice in Australian electro-pop.

- Chris Cobcroft.