Like it or not, someone like Grimes (nee Claire Boucher) comes to any conversation of her music with a lot of baggage attached. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to talk about the sheer qualitative value of her catalog (considerably more puts than takes at this point) without kickstarting a more meta conversation about The Meaning of Grimes, the provenance of her latest recordings or an essay that looks and feels more like a semiotics seminar than an album review. So let’s just put it out there, up front: I love this album. It’s sneaky smart like Madonna’s debut was (e.g., a record you can just as easily think along to at home or on the subway as you can get down to at the club; see first single “Flesh Without Blood” for details), as crafty a musical work as I’ve heard in 2015 (her collabos with Janelle Monae, “Venus Fly,” and Aristophones, “SCREAM,” cover two dramatically different ends of the dance-pop spectrum but can also easily sit side-by-side) and just a top-to-bottom enjoyable listen that begs repeat spins, with new layers that will emerge with every passing play. But I can’t help but think that we are also catching Grimes in her Speaking In Tongues moment—the point at which, like David Byrne before her, she morphs from freaky outsider weirdo to pop artist in not quite one fell swoop, but one that may very well feel like it to fans of her so-called “Witch House” roots.
So even as we read elsewhere about how much she hated the early versions of this record (to the point of dissing it in the press, then scrapping it altogether, save for a single track,“Realiti,” which in its re-recording has actually lost something vital in the process), or listen to her attempt to explain—onstage, through social media—the songs themselves, what’s becoming more obvious to me is that Grimes isn’t changing up her game so that the masses can finally appreciate her quirky, offbeat 120 BPM concoctions. Nope. The world is simply catching up with her, which is how tracks as willfully eccentric as “Easily,” “Artangels,” “Belly Of The Beat” and “California”—what with their airy, breathy choruses, fractured breakbeats and IRL instrumentation (guitars! tack piano! a freakin’ string section!)—could end up forming the soundtrack to your next sitting-there-stuck-in-traffic-on-the-405 radio moment. Art Angels is the sound of Grimes flying by the seat of her stylishly mismatched pants.
—Corey duBrowa
