Blood in Heaven: Grimes' New Album "Art Angels"

Grimes

For as long as I have been able to select my own music, I have loved underground and obscure music.  But in a weird way, what I love more is pop music that is twisted and warped beyond commercial viability until it becomes something subversive, something almost perverse, like a mutated doppelganger of everything that is normal and accepted.  This describes the music of Canadian pop artist, Grimes.

Claire Boucher, aka Grimes, is a true artist.  Not only does she write and produce her own music, but she designs her album covers and produces, designs and directs her own music videos.  And what spectacles these videos are - colorful costumes, random sets, fangs, angels, and blood.  Lots of blood.  She is a visual and audio artist in a way that Lady Gaga once was.  It is little wonder that the prestigious label 4AD picked her up, along with fellow Canadian electronic artists, Purity Ring.

In researching this review, I have watched some of her live performances for radio programs.  Just watching her is entrancing as she kneels on the floor with her various digital equipment surrounding her, scrambling over keys and knobs, warbling into the microphone as she crawls, adding layer upon layer, dimension upon dimension to her unfolding, sonic panorama.

Grimes is an artist, as expressed in the title of her fourth studio album "Art Angels".  (Her first album was a tribute to Frank Herbert's "Dune", her favorite book - and mine - called "Geidi Primes", which is reason enough for me to love her.)

Art Angel

The album starts out in typical 4AD fashion with a maudelin orchestra accompanied by Grimes' sweet soprano in the song "laughing and not being...", and then leaps right into a sauntering pop ballad called "California".  But then the record takes a turn for the bizarre in "Scream" featuring Asian rapper, Aristophanes, spouting some rapid-fire phrases in Taiwanese, accentuated by Grimes' piercing screams.  "Flesh without Blood" could almost be a tune by The Go-gos.  She shows that she truly has pop sensibilities in songs like "Belly of the Best", "Easily", "Pin", and "Butterfly", drawing on several influences - house music, Dirty Dutch, trap, and witch house.  But then she will startle the crap out of you on songs like "Kill V. Maim", which is by far my favorite song on here - a simple drum beat with a buzzing bass riff set to Grimes' high-pitched, saccharine vocals, punctuated by the occasional growl or shriek, all laced together by a cheerleader-type chorus.  There is definitely a Japanese, harajuku vibe to the song, and my kids variously say this song reminds them of anime or Baby Metal.  My other favorites are the rock steady "Realti", the bouncy "World Princess part II", and the pounding "Venus Fly", featuring R&B singer, Janelle Monae.  The bass thumps on this song along with some sick acid house sequencers.  The album simmers down to a quiet boil on the acoustic "Life in the Vivid Dream" where she plaintively moans, "Angels cry when it's raining."

Really, I can't rave enough about this record and about Grimes' talent as an artist.  This easily has become one of my favorite records of 2016.  Grimes gives me hope in pop music.  Not everything is mass-produced by writing teams.  There are real artists out there, and Claire Boucher is a real artist.