Stereoboard Albums Of The Year: Grimes - Art Angels
Thursday, 17 December 2015
Written by Huw Baines
My grandfather was a carpenter and ceramist. My house is dotted with dishes, boxes and kitchen utensils that he made. Shoulder to the wheel, I managed a D in year 9 woodwork. There are gaps in our knowledge and practical abilities that we seek to fill and others that we simply can’t. This is one of the latter. “You can do anything if you set your mind to it,” the inspirational posters scream, but not this time. Do not, under any circumstances, ask me to build you a coffee table.
Grimes’ ‘Art Angels’, more so than any other record released this year, made me feel the same way about music. Maybe it’s a wannabe punk thing, a hangover from my teenage years and the accompanying misguided ideals, but I am deeply, almost wilfully, ignorant of the technical side of modern music-making. If it helps, I also know next to nothing about the ‘old way’ of doing things.
I don’t understand what makes this microphone different from that one over there. I didn’t know if my bass pickups were active or passive when I played my first show with my shitty band back in 2001 and I still don’t fully understand the question now. I enjoy the fact that people out there know what they’re doing when I do not.
Coupled with that, I like good songs. I mean that in the simplest sense. They don’t have to reinvent the wheel - roughly five of my favourite bands sound like, or are, the Ramones - but it helps if they get the pulse going or synapses flickering. ‘Art Angels’ is the perfect storm. It’s the best pop album of the year and also a resolutely DIY technical achievement far beyond my comprehension.
Built from the ground up by Claire Boucher, it’s a record that has very few boundaries. It’s off in its own universe and wants you to tag along. It’s home to continually surprising, life-ruiningly catchy songs that manage to combine Technicolor fun with a creeping sense of unease. It consistently hits the Lynchian sweet spot between alluring and unpredictable.
“Grimes is a genuine world-builder,” Will Butler of Arcade Fire wrote while reviewing the record for the Talkhouse. “She might could make worlds big and convincing enough to change lots of people’s perception of the actual world. It feels cold to stand outside her creation and judge it.”
But judge it he did. Butler’s piece was an internet comments section dressed up in lights; at best a series of backhanded compliments and at worst only a curled lip away from sneering dismissal. It summed up the real world that ‘Art Angels’ was released into and also the parameters that Boucher sought to alter with it. Her frustrations with the bro-heavy producer landscape linked arms with anxiety at how the record might be presented by label reps or PR and the manner in which it would be received by hype-fuelled listeners at large.
“So much of my self-esteem comes from the fact that I’m like: ‘Yeah, I make my shit.’,” she told Noisey’s Emma Garland at the start of last month. “And the fact that I get asked on almost a daily basis like who made my shit — it’s like really emotionally difficult. You start to second guess yourself.”
As Boucher pulled the album’s competing threads into a whole, the blogosphere also twisted into new shapes to try and figure out the when, where and why of her follow up to ‘Visions’. We had a few breadcrumbs to follow, but they led us in different directions. There was Go, the bass-fuelled Rihanna cast off, the loping REALiTi and plenty of talk about songs mercilessly scrapped . The cynics out there might have seen signposts for an unholy mess.
REALiTi made the final cut for ‘Art Angels’ with a sort of curmudgeonly flourish. Plucked from the cutting room floor and released in demo form earlier this year, the song blossomed online even if Boucher’s relationship with it remained a little frosty. Its final incarnation was a spruced up take on the source material and, comfortably, one of the tracks of the year. I love it so much that I hate Grimes a bit for leaving it off the LP version.
There were further red herrings along the way, but the ‘lost’ album would eventually become a footnote in an evolutionary process. ‘Art Angels’ represents changes in circumstance - geographical and practical - and Boucher’s further development and experimentation as a producer. Her sharp edges and flights of fancy contributed not to an everything-including-the-kitchen-sink mishmash but a dense, multifaceted and ultimately cohesive unit.
That’s remarkable when you consider that it veers from Scream, a gleefully weird mix of Aristophanes’ verses and the unbridled fury of Boucher’s yells, to the fever-dream pop of Flesh Without Blood, via the slick Artangels and monstrous Kill v Maim. If there was nothing as outwardly zeitgest-tapping as the jettisoned Go, that song’s fusion of pop tropes and thunderous low end did filter through. ‘Art Angels’ is a wild record that nevertheless relies on traditional means: some great songs and a knack for pacing.
It also comes back to that idea of ‘world-building’ time and time again. Boucher’s influences span literature, comics, video games and films and often focus on their immersive qualities, whether you’re talking Frank Herbert’s Dune, Akira, the Mists of Avalon or the Zelda tattoo that sits close to her elbow.
‘Art Angels’, from its use of personas to its eye-popping, Boucher-illustrated sleeve and the sensory overload of the video for Flesh Without Blood, is cut from the same cloth. Its layers can be pulled apart and enjoyed separately or experienced in one giddy rush. “That’s what I respect the most: to make something that someone can actually escape into, especially in the digital age,” Boucher told Ann Friedman for The Happy Reader. “It’s so much harder to do that than to write Ulysses, in a way.”
We’re supposed to get it and engage with it. I could talk about this album for a week and would gladly take a copy with an attached bibliography for further reading. ‘Art Angels’ is something to be explored, left alone and then taken in again with fresh eyes.
Grimes Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:
Sun March 06 2016 - BRISTOL Anson Rooms
Mon March 07 2016 - LEEDS Beckett University Union
Tue March 08 2016 - NOTTINGHAM Rock City
Thu March 10 2016 - LONDON O2 Academy Brixton
Fri March 11 2016 - BIRMINGHAM O2 Institute
Sat March 12 2016 - MANCHESTER Academy
Sun March 13 2016 - GLASGOW O2 ABC
Tue March 15 2016 - DUBLIN Olympia
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