Artist: Grimes
Label: Arbutus Records
Release: 2012
Length: 48:04
Rating: 4.5/5
These days, pomp matters more to performers than the music. The more the tabloids fill up, the better their albums and concert tickets sell. The stunts are tacky, cheap, and would buy an »ordinary mortal« a few months’ rest in the Polje psych ward, yet they only drape musicians in even more fame, adulation and profit. Women, sadly, have been the ones to grab onto this tactic most eagerly. Absurd hair colors, skimpy outfits and scandals in their private lives distract from the same old melodies, shallow lyrics and a severe shortage of originality and quality. In the twenty-first century, most female musicians have become an end in themselves. In a flood of self-promotion and big boobs, the ones who actually deserve a mention get left without media publicity and bigger gigs, but a few manage to break through anyway – precisely because they’re so unlike the generic, factory-made Disney starlets that they accidentally kick off a new trend of greasy hair, boyish figures and baggy dresses. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a lesbian or a feminist, I just like listening to good music. And Grimes, even though she’ll never make the cover of Cosmopolitan, serves it up.
Claire Boucher, better known as Grimes, is half woman, half robot, and claims to come from Canada, though we suspect she dropped onto this planet from some other galaxy. Her music hints as much: from the very start it has inventively fused elements of every genre we’ve ever heard, and when they work together they conjure a surreal symphony that, despite its earthly ingredients, sounds anything but earthly.
She developed her distinctive sound back in 2010, when on her first album Geidi Primes she explored genres, rhythms and the possibilities of her own voice. A well-conceived debut is marred only by an over-the-top experimental streak that makes the record too eclectic to win over a wider audience as a whole. Grimes herself called the album »naive«, and we can only agree, since she crammed in so many sounds and ideas that the common thread of her musical aesthetic is extremely hard to follow. Flaws aside, though, she laid a solid foundation for future work with songs like the Santigold-sounding »Rosa« and the baroque-inspired »Gambang«. Each sounds great on its own – fresh and just the right amount of weird – but on the same album they clash and make for too big a bite for our »earthly« ears. She successfully kept up her search for something that would set her apart from other musicians on her second album, Halfaxa, released the same year, which proves she’s got no shortage of ideas or inspiration.
Wider recognition and critical approval came with this year’s Visions, on which she finally found her sound. In interviews she’s said that this time, with the help of amphetamines, she worked for up to three days straight, because she likes to push body and mind to the limit, since that’s when she can create her most wonderful songs. Her method clearly paid off: she’s built a fresh style whose intensity only ramps up over the thirteen tracks on offer. Opening track »Infinite Love Without Fulfilment« is soaked in positivity and a strong electronic beat that blends with hypnotic vocals, and the falsetto is front and center too – something that can often sound forced in electronic music, but with this backing it’s hard to imagine Grimes doing anything else. All the elements together form something mystical, something we’ve never heard before. The woman who redefined indie under the name tUnE-yArDs convinced me back in 2011 with Whokill that this was the peak an alternative artist could reach (in terms of a completely new approach and such radically different melodies), but Grimes has now convinced me of the opposite with Visions. There’s still plenty of room for new stylistic tweaks, and she’s filled it by mixing different genres that, unlike on her earlier albums, are neither jarring nor incompatible. You can hear it already on the next track, currently her best-known – »Genesis«. Once again a cute, upbeat piano melody mixes with falsetto and a heavy beat reminiscent of Aphex Twin, whom, by the way, she names as one of her biggest idols. True, the video comes close to the aesthetic of Nicki Minaj and other MTV pop starlets, but given how authentic and endearingly weird it feels, we can’t really hold it against her.
»Oblivion« carries on at the same tempo. The feeling that Björk, tUnE-yArDs, Lykke Li and Crystal Castles met on a spaceship and decided to record a joint album only intensifies, while Boucher deftly mixes the characteristics of dub, dubstep, R&B and, yes, baroque piano music. And it’s precisely this blend of genres from the »past« that sounds so futuristic. Fourth track »Eight« confirms it, sounding like a conversation between two robots, interrupted as a counterweight by electronically rearranged chirping of the lyrics. Fresh and welcome. Strange without trying to be. This pattern of rough meets tender continues with »Circumambient«, which whisks us off to the eighties (of the twenty-first century?), the eclectically psychedelic »Vowels = Space and Time« and »Visiting Statue«. Also worth a listen is »Be a Body«, one of her most popular songs, which is suitably dreamy yet propped up by a robust electronic base; in short – extremely representative of her music. The lyrics are interesting too: »I close my eyes until I see, I don’t need hands to touch me… Be a body.«
A dub-savvy collaboration with Doldrums (who, by the way, sound like Caribou on tranquilizers) spills over into »Colour of Moonlight (Antiochus)« , which doesn’t stray far from the vibe that runs through all her songs. »Symphonia IX (My Wait Is U)« is something you could easily hear in the last gasps of a techno party’s afterparty, while scanning the unconscious, sleeping bodies for a spot to crawl into and sleep until late afternoon. You can, tried and tested, get the same relaxed feeling with headphones in your own room, too. The next track, »Nightmusic«, flirts with opera before quickly slipping into hypnotic synthpop, with Canadian musician Majical Cloudz helping Grimes out – his offbeat sounds can be found on Soundcloud. »Skin«, the penultimate track, is yet another highlight of an album that has thrilled audiences with its otherworldly tenderness.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55qcaq0ZNYg
With the outro »Know the Way«, which draws its inspiration from Satie’s classic »Trois Gymnopédies«, Grimes wraps up an album charged with positive energy, one that has broken the boundaries of the familiar on the alternative scene and, with fresh energy, won over plenty of people who were convinced indie was dying as an innovative genre. Despite the excellent album, though, I’m afraid Grimes will collapse under the ‘hipster’ label that the internet is practically bombarding her with. True, her music is different from anything we’ve heard before, her fame hasn’t yet broken out of YouTube, and we’ll rarely hear her songs on the radio, let alone on MTV; but that shouldn’t mean her musical integrity is a flash in the pan that will vanish the moment non-prescription glasses are swapped for contact lenses. The singer has already launched a new line of rings that, by her own account, were inspired by the vulva. Fingers crossed the music stays front and center and that the twenty-four-year-old soon enchants us again with her imagination and brings her touring caravan close to us. On August 20 she stops in Munich, but right now there’s no word at all on any way to buy a ticket package. Evidently only the biggest Slovenian fans of this eccentric musician will be jostling in Kong, and we hope she hasn’t run out of imagination yet and that there will be more chances to catch her live – I’d even dare to bet that the summer music festivals of 2013 will list her as one of their headliners.
Lineup
Grimes – vocals
Anna Akhmatova – lyrics
Jasper Baydala – backing
Sebastian Cowan – mixing
Production
Grimes
Tracklist
1. Infinite Love Without Fulfilment
2. Genesis
3. Oblivion
4. Eight
5. Circumambient
6. Vowels = Space and Time
7. Visting Statue
8. Be a Body
9. Colour of Moonlight (Antiochus) (ft. Doldrums)
10. Symphonia IX (My Wait Is U)
11. Nightmusic (ft. Majical Cloudz)
12. Skin
13. Know the Way (Outro)
