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Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Grimes - Visions review

Year : 2012
Genre : Synthpop, Electronic, Post-Internet
Label : Arbutus
Origin : Canada
Rating : 7.2 / 10

Canadian artist Claire Boucher is the - necessary - premiere ingredient of the creative force behind one woman band Grimes. Claire Boucher herself labels her 2012 full length as "post-Internet", as it doubtless is music conceived by a spirit that is deeply affected by its own fascinations and dependencies relating to the cultural and pseudo-social experience called the Internet. On another note, you can't help but notice the superficial sidekick-irony of you gaining information of the "post-Internet" nature of this release via the informational highway itself. All hail to Wikipedia

The cover art of the Visions LP is deceitful, making you think that it is the no love lost precursor for relentless death metal orthodoxies, but, the music itself deviates from this suspicion via all the combined charms of pink marshmallow vistas and fractal soap bubbles. The music on this synthpop release reigns in no need for artificial sweeteners, as the audio data on it equates to the very sonic epitome of the substance in question. Read on to find out more about this album.


Visions is music with the calm agenda to soak your awareness into ultra-mellow synthpop, as the backbone of the instrumentalization is exclusively dependent on a multitude of synths and their heavily tamed drum machine routines. The content is successful at drawing its own aspired character, as the audio exhibits a constant-, fluid, ear-caressing drops of sound and slim blanket of sounds quality that never seeks to intimidate, not even when it reaches segments with lot of notes and timbers parked in it. Grimes' music sounds both to be - in a proper way - casual, as one attribute of the delivery seems to be its nature of being composed of enthusiastic audio experiments the creator herself must have been intrigued by. This is all good so fat, and there are not many things to bring it down, either. More on those a little bit later.

The record is brave enough to reveal its facevalue in hasty fashion, that which proves to be the equal of its ultimate value, too. Grimes' lullaby-signing swims-, floats-, twirls in heavy pools of pure-synthetic - TUKK! - pink marshmallow-procession and the related effect parade of a set of favorite tricks, most often keeping a certain degree of sobriety intact to refrain from sugar-overdose radicalism. Yet, Grimes' aforementioned bag of tricks only is as abundant currently as the presets of the synths are, and sometimes she makes creative decisions that are harmful to her music, and not beneficiary, in my opinion. To give you such an example, there are some relatively deluded vocal segments by which Grimes pitch shifts her voice until she probably thinks she sounds supercute, whereas she just sounds like a retarded pokémon after frontal lobotomy, but hey, sporting a retarded pokémon synthpop rockstar under your bed (beside the rabbit with the flying suitcase) is nothing out of the ordinary in this day and age. I have the hunch that the words of the lyrics are not necessarily designed to be decoded immediately, yet, whenever they seek to paint more direct pictures in the mind, their ability to convey the moods of a random artist girl from the intr4n3t, is unquestionable.


Composition-wise, there is a set of elegant, efficient deliveries on the spin, and you, unfortunately, will have a relatively fair share of almost certain sonic annoyance that will make you want the record to STOP. This is not a good thing to endure and feel at all, because, while the contribution exhibits its weakest form in the mid-section, - in my opinion, of course - it gets back to its prime form via the climax. This, though, is only a relatively lopsided release with way too much pink strawberry charm and lost-in-space-grade playfulness of a character to make it possible to write of it in a derogatory fashion without feeling yourself as a dangerless bitter dick afterwards. If you need your fix of music after which you can understand what other styles of the same things really are about, then this is a release worth trying to read a Blade Runner comics to.

Rating : 7.2 / 10

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