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::k4:
a r t i s t :: Grimes
t i t l e :: Art Angels
d a t e :: 2015-00-00
l a b e l :: 4AD
g e n r e :: Electronic
s o u r c e :: CD
b i t r a t e :: 965 kbps avg
e n c o d e r :: FLAC 1.2.1 -8 -V
t r a c k s :: 15
p l a y t i m e :: 53:57
s i z e :: 380.1MB
tracklist
1 Laughing And Not Being Normal 1:47
2 California 3:18
3 Scream (ft. Aristophanes) 2:20
4 Flesh Without Blood 4:24
5 Belly Of The Beat 3:25
6 Kill V. Maim 4:06
7 Artangels 4:07
8 Easily 3:03
9 Pin 3:32
10 Realiti 5:06
11 World Princess II 5:05
12 Venus Fly (ft. Janelle Monße) 3:45
13 Life In The Vivid Dream 1:27
14 Butterfly 4:12
15 Realiti (Demo) 4:20
releasenotes
"I'll never be your dream girl," sings Claire Boucher on "Butterfly", the
final song on Art Angels, her most audacious album to date. Perhaps she's just
being coy, because for many she is exactly that. In the age of the female pop
auteur, Boucher's work as Grimes is a glorious addition to the canon, someone
who beckons us to the dancefloor with big ideas and bigger beats, and resists
simplistic notions of who she can be on a record or a stage. Art Angels is a
gilded coffin nail to outmoded sexist arguments that women in pop are
constructed products, a mere frame for male producers' talentsùthat because
their music is immaculate, they are somehow not authentic. These 14 tracks are
evidence of Boucher's labor and an articulation of a pop vision that is
incontrovertibly hers, inviting the wider world in.
Grimes shows that Boucher is the ultimate fangirl study: a D.I.Y. musician
whose love of Mariah, Katy Perry, and K-pop has expanded her palette, driven
by her fascination with the possibilities of the synthetic and unreal, and
ultimately given wings to Art Angels. Here, she closes the gap between the pop
she's idolized and the pop she is capable of. Boucher has claimed that the
record has two halves, and indeed, the songs line up most easily into
beginning- and end-of-the-night dancefloor jams. The former is exemplified by
the bright, anxious "Kill V. Maim", with its mocking cheerleader chant over
blown-out beats and Boucher working both ends of her register in a propulsive
celebration of vocal fry.
Same for "Flesh Without Blood", which is the sweetest fuck-off of 2015, one
that highlights that there is much more to Boucher's voice than Visions ever
had a chance to reveal. The song is Boucher eating the lunch that Miley
packed, may it be #blessed with infinite stadium-EDM remixes. Post-Art Angels,
it's hard to imagine anyone will reject a Boucher-penned cut: This is an
album, but it's also a resume, and someone who made "California" could
certainly be making crossover hits for any marquee Nashville name, while
"Easily" suggests that Kesha co-writes should be in Boucher's future.
The late-night closers and their arrangements are where Boucher shows her
mastery and discipline as a producer. "Realiti", "Venus Fly" with Janelle
Monße, and "Butterfly" give her a new set of peers: Sure, she's there with
collaborator Monße and Annie Clark as an auteur, but purely as a pop producer
she's as deft and clever as anyone we consider a master of Top 40 craftùbe it
Greg Kurstin or Diplo. The songs are graced with small details: curious skeets
of beats, buried samples that only appear once, toxically cute '90s pop
guitar. The songs build in unexpected ways, but explode and gratify in the way
we hope pop always will. "Butterfly" is a let-tonight-last-forever mutant
bruiser with roiling sub-bass, the chorus's side-chained pulse making it like
an uncanny valley version of Kylie Minogue's "Can't Get You Out of My Head".
All of this might seem as if Boucher has fashioned a whole-cloth reinvention
and is gunning for the Top 40, but neither of these things feel true. Art
Angels is a natural progression from Visions; if you strained out some of the
processing and murk of the latter, you would find these structures lurking.
Boucher's voice is recognizable and familiar, but it's bigger and has more
range and depth than on "Oblivion". This album foregrounds her, samples her,
piles tracks of her half a dozen high to form melodies and countermelodies.
One of the most notable and striking differences between Art Angels and its
Top 40 kin is that these are not love songs. The album is an epic holiday
buffet of tendentious feminist fuck-off, with second helpings for anonymous
commenters and music industry blood-suckers. Her conflicted, vertiginous
relationship with the fast fame that followed Visions seems to have led her to
a place of DGAF liberation. Some songs, like "Kill V. Maim", course with a
thrilling rage, even a casual misandry. ("I'm only a man/ I do what I can,"
she sings on the hook). Yet, what's most exciting within Art Angels is the
sheer will and fearlessness of Boucher's fight to be heard and seen on her own
terms. She's not a human Tumblr, as we called her (somewhat humiliatingly) in
2012; she's a human zeitgeist, redrawing all the binaries and boundaries by
which we define pop music and forcing us to come along.
http://www.grimesmusic.com
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