At this time last year, Grimes was a mere curio. Unearthed via two 2010 LPs, Halfaxa and Geidi Primes, the Vancouver-born, Montreal-based musician spent 2011 not so much sustaining momentum, as “rising” acts are wont to do these days, but working — in shadows and through quiet releases — toward this moment: her 4AD debut, Visions.
A lot of writing on Claire Boucher tries to be precious, often invoking her diminutive stature and impish vocals, the virtuosity of her auto-didacticism, and her “goth R&B” leanings (bloggable in a post-witch house world). It does seem that Boucher’s unwilling to be gussied up, and thatsense of realness — in a world where attention, from anyone, is higher than heaven — lends her the aura of acynosure. But what make Grimes even more real than her artistic pretensions suggest is that, unlike her music, she’s hardly ethereal — goofy even, and she has a lisp!
And in an underworld-y pop domain where vocally pristineice-blonde divas like Zola Jesus and Austra’s Katie Stelmanis hold court, Grimes stays resolutely committed to being weird where the others have produced loftier, more accessible, works. This doesn’t mean Boucher is more authentic, and it’s not that the others aren’t (the Standard office is so Team Austra we should probably silkscreen some shirts); it just makes Visions seem less caught-up, more unabashedly what it is.
Visions is brighter than any of Boucher’s prior releases. Despite being made in a bedroom on GarageBand, there’s no lo-fi fetishizing here. Visions is refined and polished in the way a major release has to be and, which someone serious about an opportunity to produce art, wants it to be. This cleanness renders every glowering synth-tone more candied (“Be A Body”), and pleasantly thickens every warped bass note (“Eight”). And despite Visions’ arty leanings, there’s a lot of the sonic precision and strong-headedness of really good, generation-spanning dance records, from New Wave to early ’90s R&B pop to staunch house to K-Pop (another acknowledged influence).
Visions‘ cheery omnipotence provides relief from the melancholia buried within. You know these are, in part, songs about feelings. Like a mantra, on “Genesis,” she repeats, “Never feel never.” The cartoonish chorus of “Oblivion” doesn’t outwardly project that it’s a total loner jam. There’s an implied heaviness gleaned from these scraps of melodic sighs and coos, because Visions doesn’t mess about with pedantic quotables. Sometimes it is so perilous just to feel, and so you get Grimes’ need to hide by tracking vocals choral and distant and in a round, like an opaque veneer composed of layers and layers of diaphanous sounds.
Eventually all that cosmic sadness is transmitted into one of the best songs on Visions, the ballad-like “Skin.” Vocal runs and breathy falsetto are doubtless in homage to Mariah Carey, one of Grimes’ big obsessions. It’s a song that mutates, minute-by-minute, from bare-voiced lament to a mellifluous mixture of sounds, anchored by a simple four-bar loop of orbital synth. And it’s Grimes at her mercurial best.
____
Anupa Mistry writes about music for Toronto Standard. You can follow her on Twitter at @_anupa.
For more, follow us on Twitter at @torontostandard, and subscribe to our newsletter.
