Album Review: Art Angels by Grimes

Can Grimes replicate Visions? Does she even want to?

Electro-sprite Claire Boucher (aka Grimes) binned an album's worth of material before recording Art Angels, her fourth and soon-to-be most scrutinised effort.

For a while, it appeared she’d scurried back to the drawing board when her (frighteningly large and even more frightening vocal) Tumblr following rejected supposed first single "Go" back in 2014.

That song – initially meant for Rihanna - was the first bit of new music she'd unveiled since her 2012 breakout Visions, an album whose centerpiece was the revealing, pulsating "Oblivion", still one of the most affecting songs ever produced about sexual assault.

Clearly, the polished, club-ready and impersonal “Go” was not what Grimes’ most devoted followers had eagerly spent two years waiting for.

Grimes ditched her DIY Vancouver studio for the glitzier Los Angeles to plot her comeback. It would have been fair to assume that the resulting record, based on the “Go” backlash, would sound like a refried Visions; fan-service, except delivered like ransom to a ravenous fan-base.

Instead, Art Angels is a hugely confident mutant-pop record; spiky and colourful where the echoing Visions was spooky and deathlike. Instead of retreating, she’s strolled further towards strangeness. Her vocals are unsheathed, closer to the front of the track, and if that wasn’t already a big enough statement, on occasion she ululates with VH1 Diva-like abandon.

Turns out Boucher wasn't crippled by the criticism; she was somehow galvanised by it. Some of the songs – still about alienation and punctuated with violence - sound as if they’ve emerged from a nightmarish void, but at least here, the void comes in a variety of pastel colours to suit your particular existential malaise.

The album opens with “Laughing and Not Being Normal”, a short, baroque mission statement that leads into “California”, the album’s least listenable pop cacophony. Yet, it does include this telling lyric: “You only like me when you think I’m looking sad.” (Take that, Tumblr.)

The other seemingly-chipper pop tunes are much better at marrying despair with a sunnier soundscape. Lead-off single “Flesh Without Blood”, “Belly of the Beat”, “World Princess, Pt. II” “Artangels” and “Pin” (with its references to black holes, banshees and cutting off your own skin) would, stunningly, sound right at home on Carly Rae Jepsen’s pop confection Emotion; news that should send the Grimes faithful into their own black hole of exasperation. I mean the comparison as a compliment. Jepsen’s record is great! Its only problem is that it misses a central persona. And ‘persona’ is not something Grimes has ever been accused of missing.

If you’re looking for idiosyncrasies, Art Angels’ got ‘em. “Kill V. Maim”, apparently written from the perspective of a vampiric, gender-switching Michael Corleone, feels genuinely threatening, despite the Nintendo-era sound effects that drive it. “Scream”, even scarier, sees Grimes take a backseat to female Taiwanese rapper Aristophanes.

As a producer, she’s only grown in skill with terrifying scope. Every instrument on this thing was engineered by Boucher, after the experience of being shunted aside by “sexist” male engineers previously. They get a serve in “Venus Fly”, where Janelle Monáe is invited to join in on the feminist fire with the accusatory refrain: “Why you looking at me again?”

The highlight, however, is her reworked “REALiTi” (only available as a bonus track); a relic off the last, forsaken record, dropped as a demo early this year to sate listeners while she toiled in the studio. With an accompanying video comprised of tour footage, a halting beat and lyrics about her new normal of "mountains to climb, taking all my time", “REALiTi” felt like a hopeless post-fame anthem by a sensitive artist wilting under the spotlight, rather than rising to it.

On Art Angels, the halt is replaced with a strut. The subtly altered beat now rollicks and her lyrical delivery has more thrust. "Welcome to reality" suddenly seems less defeatist and more determined. On Twitter, she described it as being “from a diff era.” I dunno. This sounds like the new Grimes to me.

4/5

Art Angels is available now.