Grimes: Visions

When I saw Grimes open for Austra last year, I saw a meek DIY artsy girl dressed in a grungy t-shirt and dark tights wail into a microphone while expertly mixing complex tracks to produce a seriously rhythmic dance spell. Now, as 2012 has unraveled before us, Claire Boucher, the Montreal-based mastermind behind Grimes, has become the “it girl” of the indie music blogosphere. Much more than just a buzz band, Grimes has sky-rocketed in popularity thanks to the success of her previous albums (Geidi Primes, Halafaxa, Darkbloom) as well as her signing onto 4AD records to release her latest album Visions. Now when I look at Grimes, I see a meek DIY artsy girl dressed in slightly less grungy t-shirts and dark tights that has created some of the most imperative and compelling songs in quite some time (or at least since the beginning of the year).

The fruition of several years’ worth of experimentation, Visions is a mature and masterfully mixed collection of truly unique sounds. Proclaiming her work to be “post-internet,” Boucher has engendered a powerful mythos encapsulating nothing short of an aural manifesto on the current state of music, technology, and art. While this term necessarily implies a consequential distant relationship between Grimes’ music and the instantaneous and viral nature of the internet, what really matters are the globalized and anachronistic networks that have allowed musicians like Boucher to find inspiration in everything from Korean pop to 80s disco to glitch to Enya. In this sense, there’s certainly something to be said about a musician that can pull off the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink technique and remain consistently inconsistent in what has resulted in an album that resembles something more like a contagious fever dream (just take a listen to the schizophrenic chorus of “Circumambient”).

While tracks like “Oblivion” and “Genesis” (both of which have enjoyed anticipatory exposure on the internet) provide the album’s hook, the true gems of Visions lay in the murky, and sometimes menacing, moments of songs such as “Eight” and “Nightmusic,” and (thankfully) much of the album stays true to this style. Others like “Skin” and “Know the Way (Outro)” allow Boucher to stretch her voice, implanting a beautiful meditative quality to complement the throbbing pastiche of rhythms and beats found in most other tracks. To some people’s dismay, the vocals can sometimes come off as childish, warbly, weak, or piercing, but really, this is all a part of the charm. Sure, “Vowels = Space and Time” is relatively soul/R&B-inspired, but would a voice like Beyoncé’s or Mariah Carey’s really make anything better? Listening to Grimes is not about concentrating on the singing or parsing together the lyrics (which really can prove to be an impossible task). For Boucher, the vocals are just as much an instrument as the many technological devices at her disposal, something of a tip of the hat to the Cocteau Twins. What makes Visions enjoyable is precisely the intricate and compact relationship between the layered synths, beat machines, and vocals that create something like a mash-up between Björk’s art-pop lyricism, Burial’s hazy sampling, and The Cure’s post-punk goth melodies. To this end, Grimes latest album refuses to fall prey to the pits of the indie music blogosphere; instead, it stands out as one of our contemporary culture’s most gripping and rarest “visions” of the current and future state of music.

- Gary Kafer, The Gary Kafer Sugar Wafer (Mondays from 2-4pm @ WQHS.org)