This is a pretty emotional experience. From the dissolution of her former band Love Outside Andromeda, Sianna Lee has resurfaced from the maelstrom with a debut solo album, Phoenix Propeller. When the Melbourne quartet quietly folded in 2006, no one really knew of the brooding tensions behind the scenes. Four years on from the band’s tumultuous cessation, Lee charts a deeply personal course through 10 tracks of dark, brooding indie rock.

Whereas Love Outside Andromeda exhumed their frustrations through distortion pedals and driving post-grunge salvos, the music on Phoenix Propeller retains all the tension like a tightly wound coil. You can feel the woman behind the music, seething behind muted power chords, any moment set to combust. However, the only time she really conflagrates is on ‘Molten’, which is as close to anything from Love Outside Andromeda’s back catalogue as Lee gets. Aptly, it’s a song about escaping, with Lee singing acerbically, “Point black, burned alive, cut throat, fuse blown.” Otherwise, Lee’s songs are driven by a maudlin energy; she’s reflective rather than irascible. Anger is endemic on Phoenix Propeller, but what makes a song like ‘Rocking Horse’ even more lacerating is how Lee juxtaposes the pitter-patter of tom drums and the delicate crack of reverberated guitar with stinging lines like, “It was a cell block and a future you didn’t want/You paid half the money, get out.”

It’s great not to hear Lee reconstituting the framework she employed with Love Outside Andromeda. Quite often on her debut she works with a limited sonic palette - a crystalline guitar line, sparse percussion – like on ‘You Are The Sea’, with its gentle ebb and flow and Lee’s dreamy cadence. But she does mix it up. ‘Mother and Daughter’ shuffles like a sad dancer to the soundtrack of incessantly strummed guitars, punctuating shakers and mournful piano accordion, while opener ‘Asie Incomplete’ beautifully introduces all the drama of Phoenix Propeller by employing sweeping strings to bolster the song’s keening emotion.

It'd be remiss of me not to mention the fragility of the album’s closing number. ‘It’s Dark Enough To See The Stars’ is Lee at her bleakest. It encapsulates everything that makes her debut so moving. When she sings, “Right now the sun could swallow me/I would do anything to be replaced”, you’re transported to a time in Lee’s life when it must have seemed like the world was going to suffocate her.

It’s Lee’s vocals, though, that ties this debut together. Her voice – an amalgam of PJ Harvey and Chrissy Amphlett – communicates the hardened scars of her broken relationship with Love Outside Andromeda drummer Joe Hammond. The breakup was the catalyst for this album, but at the same time it feels like the end point for a healing process that’s taken four years to complete. This is her catharsis, and it makes for heavy but compelling listening.

by Dom Alessio