Grimes/Claire Boucher thread

if you're going to rip off the sacred bones design scheme

well, it does "rip off" the sacred bones design scheme (general layout, fonts), but also pushes beyond it in interesting ways. and the drawing is wonderful. one of my favorite album covers of the year so far.

Skin is killing me. Be a Body (侘寂) too. all of them really.

I think the album really shows post-everything/Internet music doesn't have to just be some senseless exercise in referencing. like there's the Mr. Bungle/Girl Talk-style, 'yo look what just threw in' approach, but it can be done more selectively. like anything is available, but then you can pick out a finite set of elements with more purpose. this feels really cohesive and harmonious to me, like there's a logic to the aesthetic system she creates, and real emotional resonance (really gets to me actually). could probably work out some cultural meaning in this beyond just 'hey post-modernism waka waka'

cf julianna barwick who hooked me straight away, and gazelle twin whose music i absolutely adore sinking into. grimes has no gravitas.

― if u leave imma crank wu-tang in my black matte truck (lex pretend), Saturday, February 18, 2012 11:15 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The (excellent) Frankie Rose album is much more in Julianna Barwick territory than this is, IMO.

She comes across as tremendously likable in the p4k interview I think - love how she invokes all this hi falutin stuff almost inevitably to have a go at herself, and she seems to anticipate a lot of the criticisms that people might want to throw at her without seeming like that's what she set out to do.

Boucher, I mean.

Smoke weed, listen to Mariah Carey. Hilarious, and awesome.

she seems like an excellent person! but i'm not hearing anything compelling in her music.

Frankie Rose is a vocalist, songwriter and musician living in Brooklyn, NY. She was formerly an original member of acclaimed garage rock acts Crystal Stilts, Dum Dum Girls, and the Vivian Girls.[1]

erm i'll stick with julianna barwick thanks :o

her background really does not inform the new album at all

haha lex how do you ever manage to listen to gang gang dance without vomiting everywhere.

i carefully avoid finding out information about them that might turn me off.

no, if i google a new act and p4k AND stereogum are on the first page of results then i consider that a sign. dunno what the fuck "brooklyn vegan" is but with a name like that it can't be a good thing.

rofl

man i wish i could not know what brooklyn vegan is

So obsessed with this album. Like I start to get really, really excited when I hear the piano-based second chorus in "Genesis" and that feeling doesn't really dissipate for the rest of the album.

genesis was played yesterday morning on 6 music.

having seen the album artwork i was very pleasantly surprised as it was not what i expected at all.

sounded ace.

glad to see other people liking this so much. was kinda surprised to see some people so meh on it tbh (I mean yeah different strokes - but this is easily turning out to be album of the year so far for me)

To be fair "Genesis" is by far the most cute tune on the album, there are some darker bits that go halfway to matching the cover.

Though in some ways gothstep feels so prevalent as the default move for artsy electro chicks that there's something unexpectedly refreshing-feeling about the combination of eerieness and intermittent cutesiness on Visions.

it's weird that none of the reviews i've read have mentioned 'oblivion', when that seems like the obvious 'hit'

http://www.pitchfork.com/news/45488-the-tale-of-grimes-insane-2009-houseboat-adventure-the-best-thing-youll-read-all-day/

what a tale!

god, "Circumambient" just sent me into a spazz. awesome.

This is a strange record, paper-thin vocals, barely competent use of a drum machine, and yet it's strangely beguiling. A lot of it's in the synths that hold the whole thing together, like she's found a really lovely ambient techno album from the early 90s and worked over the top of it.

grimes has no gravitas.

But she's not aiming for it. One of the things I like about this record is that it isn't constantly doing the glowery face.

the entire thing is paper thin. i thought i'd like it! i gave it several tries! NOTHING STICKS. i have no idea what you're all hearing.

does this sound like the blow?

lol the first 30 seconds of "Infinite Love Without Fulfillment" made me go "this is what Zooey Deschanel's electro side project would sound like"

i should probably go ahead and start a gazelle twin thread because it pisses me off every time i see this get attention instead

"Genesis" sounds like it really wants to be J-Pop

actually I guess this entire album really wants to be J-Pop by way of Sweden? that's the vibe I am getting from the first 3 songs

This is a strange record, paper-thin vocals, barely competent use of a drum machine

i have to vigorously disagree about her drum machines. the parts aren't incredibly complicated but i wasn't joking about the spaz-session that circumambient provoked last night. i seriously lost my shit, it was weird. part of that might be because i'm a drummer with a bit of a improv background, so when i hear her drums i also hear all the parts that i'm playing on top of and around the beats - it sounds fine its own, but it's the imagined space that sends me into a fit.

anyway, possibly someone else will understand what i'm trying and failing to express.

"the drum machines are good because the way that i imagine playing over the top of them in my head is good" = i'm a fucking idiot

It's so strange that Lex and I are having such opposite reactions to this and Gazelle Twin, like some bizarro inverse world. Because I find GT so nothingy and paper thin and nothing to latch on to, while Grimes sends me to a happy place. But their music is nothing like one another, so I do not understand that "why would you listen to this when there is that?" comparison. At all.

I like both Gazelle Twin and Grimes, but then again I have a place for both Fever Ray and, idunno, Stacey Q, in my collection

Mentioned it elsewhere, but listening to Grimes is like looking over the shoulder of a prodigy drawing with charcoal on paper for the first time. Formal art training & oil paints would likely just overwhelm the spontaneity, ease (thinness?) which are the present appeal.

Yes, that's the thing, the spontaneity, the shooting off in unexpected angles, the excited jumble of it all - the fact that she *seems* so excited by everything still, like the music is just rolling out of her in a mad rush.

i should probably go ahead and start a gazelle twin thread because it pisses me off every time i see this get attention instead

― lex pretend, Tuesday, February 21, 2012 3:56 PM (54 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Lex, is this going to be the album that you started off enjoying/appreciating aspects of but not falling in love with but which is close enough to things you love that by December you will be hating it and yelling at us all for voting for it? A la 'Young Galaxy' or whatever?

There's one every year.

I think if no one paid any attention to Grimes, he would probably come round on it, or at least ignore it. But the fact that she's now getting attention from P4k and the NME and all that means that we're all sheep for liking her, even those of us who have been listening since you and Owen were raving about her. Or something.

I mean, I have it in my heart to love plenty of artists all at the same time, and hand out attention as I see fit. But I don't have it in my heart to hand out attention to an artist like Gazelle Twin if I just. don't. like. them. This "why are you listening to this instead of that?" game with not comparable artists is just stupid.

i think i'm comparing grimes and gazelle twin b/c i discovered them in the same place at the same time - your knifelike thread on the sandbox WCC. i didn't fully get grimes then but i assumed i'd come round but her music leaves no impression on me despite trying several times and yes SUDDENLY everyone is talking about her and that is annoying, if that hadn't happened i would've likely forgotten she existed.

did anyone vote for young galaxy? i was quite pleased that seemed to have been forgotten by EOY time. bad album.

I think the rhythm programming on this is excellent actually. A little bit rough-sounding but not actually rough in the sense of lacking nuance or finesse - basically this is just because Grimes is not observing the post-dubstep/minimal orthodoxy of hyper-clipped drum hits. I think she likes the slightly-degraded texture of fuller electronic drums.

Aphex Twin's "Xtal" is the tune I would point to as the past-masterpiece which I think most obviously sets out the stylistic framework that Grimes mostly works in here, that slightly grainy quality deliberately deployed to suggest a more human form of transcendence.

But the other thing to note is how sensitively transformations and transitions in the rhythms are deployed. This can be more obvious, like the beat switch-ups in "Genesis", or more subtle, like the way in which the ever-present 4X4 kickdrum behind "Nightmusic" rises and falls in prominence so that that lilting humanness she ordinarily goes for becomes subsumed within pounding mechanised mindlessness.

The only actual moment on the album that strikes me as suggesting a lack of programming skill and finesse is the synth loop on "Oblivion" which has an awkwardly-joined-together bit which throws out the groove slightly. This might have been deliberate but I suspect is not - it's too close to being right to come across as intentionally wrong.

and it's not just here obv but it's totally that thing AGAIN where i rave about an artist and everyone carefully looks in the other direction and ignores it, but as soon as p4k hand out a best fucking new fucking music or whatever it is EVERYONE I KNOW rushes off to hear it

...

you could solve that by pitching pieces to Pitchfork

wait which artist is that

t's totally that thing AGAIN where i rave about an artist and everyone carefully looks in the other direction and ignores it

maybe it's because you constantly phrase this as "UGH YOU LIKE THEM? WHY AREN'T YOU LISTENING TO ___?" it's pretty annoying and based on this weird concept that one band/artist can displace another band/artist.

like people can listen to grimes AND gazelle twin

anyways based on one listen the grimes album is nice enough but i don't really get what's special about it. i liked it enough i'll listen to it more though.

Aphex Twin's "Xtal" is the tune I would point to as the past-masterpiece which I think most obviously sets out the stylistic framework that Grimes mostly works in here, that slightly grainy quality deliberately deployed to suggest a more human form of transcendence.

This is why she is such such such WCC-bait.

Alex, you saw me getting frustrated last year when no one was paying attention to Barbara Panther because no ILX bigwigs or P4k writers were repping for her, and she still placed in the EOY poll due to slow and steady campaigning.

And like I said, lots of us didn't hear about her from P4k, we heard about her from the Canadian contingent - Alex in Montreal and Owen P! I will listen to almost anything that those two agree on!

I listened to this before the pitchfork review but was pretty underwhelemed for the first listen and put it away for two weeks. Then came back to it and was suddenly in love (this was still before the pitchfork review though).

Lex I think that you attribute too much power to your enemies. A BNM on pitchfork is often reflective of where public opinion is going, rather than causal.

and it's not just here obv but it's totally that thing AGAIN where i rave about an artist and everyone carefully looks in the other direction and ignores it, but as soon as p4k hand out a best fucking new fucking music or whatever it is EVERYONE I KNOW rushes off to hear it

― lex pretend, Tuesday, February 21, 2012 5:03 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I mean, I will cop to not having heard Gazelle Twin yet and I will get on that, but generally I think most people HERE at least (if you're mad about the universe as a whole I can't do much about that) take your recommendations as seriously as P4K's or mine or whoevers (if not moreso).

It's been a couple of years since a BNM at p4k made me check out something I wasn't already inclined to check for, but a rave from you about Nikkiya or Brianna or Jade Alston or whoever will make me sit up and pay attention. Just FYI.

Also, I meant to playfully rib, not start another pile-on about lex's approach to exhorting people to listen to music. Maybe that's not entirely possible these days. But it was light-hearted in intent, so maybe we can lay off and just talk about Grimes. Cool? Cool.

That said, I also voted for Young Galaxy, so maybe I'm persona non grata.

well the nikkiya and gazelle twin threads i started have both died swift deaths so obviously not