Grimes/Claire Boucher thread

I wouldn't call them "monomaniacal," I'd call them "fucking weird"!

Those kinds of songs don't need a contextual framework because the listener "gets" them within five seconds basically - whereas Grimes' current songs flit and dart all over the place.

grimes needs to soundtrack a youtube of squirrel suit people and get with that caffeine beverage $$

there's even a doppler effect sound in Kill V. Maim. Maybe have a squirrel suit person fly by the camera at that part. it will be huge.

It's interesting to see how the dissonance triad of "Grimes is a great auteur" / "Art Angels unequivocally shoots for the highs of mainstream pop" / "Mainstream pop is shit music for dumb people" plays out in different individuals. For some, it collapses into "Art Angels is shit and not Grimes' *true* sound"; for some, "Now Grimes is shit"; for some, "mainstream pop is probably OK actually".
Of course this doesn't apply to everyone, since there were plenty of people into mainstream pop *and* Grimes, so that they are fine with taking the album as a successful convergence of things they loved already.
As for me, I am totally fine with mutually contradictory ideas, so I think G is wonderful, the album is wonderful, and 90% of chart music is shit.

this song was actually done for the girls soundtrack ftr:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt0IiGxNntw

after M.I.A. and Lana Del Rey and The Weeknd had the gigantic pop hits that various people on ilm hoped or feared would or wouldn't happen (and countless other pop-leaning critical darlings didn't get any chart love), it feels kinda tedious to have this kind of back-and-forth about another artist. maybe it will happen, maybe it won't.

She's not up to it as a live performer to be a pop super star. One of the worst shows I have ever seen live.

Isn't the question not whether or not she could have a pop hit but whether or not there's something intrinsic to her current direction and to her art that could find popular appeal? I don't know the details of Lana del Rey's hit (looks like most of her singles just surfed the lower reaches of the hot 100) but certainly with MIA her hit was a quirk of cinema crossover and a particularly effective sample, an extrinsic quality; she didn't become a charting artist bc she never really had a grasp on what a broad audience is interested in musically; with weeknd something similar happened, he needed songwriting ringers /producers brought in to crossover

Of course there's something about weeknd, del Rey, MIA that has some intrinsic appeal. But while what the chattering classes choose to gravitate towards in an artist may have some broad appeal if properly marketed or reshaped, you're talking about artists who in the main are beloved by a self selecting audience for some quality that doesn't include reaching outwards and instead appeals to a potentially large but still marginal cult

I'm not saying grimes is one of these artists per se.... I think that's why this question of pop has come up so much for her, in addition to her expressed interest in pop, is that she feels like an artist who could potentially have both a writer-appealing sensibility but also write amazing pop records...this album to me feels a bit conservative in that respect, but then I don't think popular appeal is an inherently conservative move

Largely agree with the above - my interest in the above topic is less whether a chart crossover will happen and more the varying overlapping meanings of "pop" that get deployed in these discussions and where this music fits on that blurry venn diagram.

What I could certainly imagine is Grimes writing tunes for other more chart-friendly artists (as per Chairlift) and scoring a hit that way.

I just heard the Realiti demo after getting used to the album version and the demo is so astoundingly better. I had forgotten of the extended break in the demo halfway into the song. I'm realizing now that Art Angels is lacking in these moments of clarity. Every song just goes up and up without marveling in the atmosphere that has been created for too long. Visions lived for those moments and Art Angels has killed them almost entirely (Butterfly has a good one and Easily seems to move from one into another).

I'm guessing she'll make her way onto the Radio One playlist before too long but the difference between UK and US radio seems so vast that I wouldn't extrapolate anything from that.

Why do you all like Realiti so much? It's one of the weaker things here for me.

Have you heard the demo version Matt? It's quite different.

It really isn't.

^

Not as different as early reactions on this thread suggested, but different enough that the demo sounds like the pinnacle of a sound not captured on this album. Whereas the album version is good but not really a standout (which is not too much of a criticism: everything here is pretty great to awesome IMO).

the demo is sublime, album version nothing special

if I read spotify correctly Flesh w/o Blood has 3 million listens, that's p good (compare: "Everything is Embarrasing" (2014) has 9 million)

Also, 3 million views on YouTube.

Another thing with the "Realiti" demo is that the video clip is very important to me and a lot of my enjoyment of the song is tied up in the ~vibes~ it disseminates.

was suggested upthread that album version is mocking the demo, vocals def seem less sincere to me

Why do you all like Realiti so much? It's one of the weaker things here for me.

― Matt DC, Tuesday, November 17, 2015 6:16 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it was released early and ppl binged on it when they were starved for grimes

not sure I understand what you mean by "less sincere" xp

'sincerity' as a musical criticism term should be a temp ban offence by now

the 90s club remix synth sounds kind of insincere, or just bored, like you can picture someone limply pressing down on the keys when they played that part

She's not up to it as a live performer to be a pop super star. One of the worst shows I have ever seen live.

― mickcsmitkh (micarl), Monday, November 16, 2015 9:12 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

did you see her last night at terminal 5?

butterfly almost too on the nose for a closer but i love it and never want it to end .

i think california could be a mega smash. 'cause i get carried away' gives me chills

A secret thing with Skinny Puppy? Really?

Bringing out guests =/ make her good live

works for taylor swift

i think i'm more amused at this idea you need to be able to bring it live to make it as a pop star

oblivion crossed over in ways i never would've imagined, i can see this managing some exponential version of that kind of pop success but radio seems very very unlikely, even if it was smuggled in via movie/tv means. i'm not sure it totally matters now anyway tbh. like there's a level of radio penetration she would need to become a certain kind of megastar, it certainly doesn't hurt to have radio on yr side, but it's not as necessary as it was. on first listen i thought the new one was good but it would never replace oblivion in my heart or whatever but now i'm not so sure. the lyrics do make me wince at times though. still mainly just happy that she pulled it off.

There are several songs on here that I could imagine being ubiquitous movie trailer "paper planes"-type megahits, flesh without blood among them. I hope it happens because grimes is brilliant and she deserves to become obscenely rich.

What kind of listener wouldn't dig Pin? Thr dreamy eccentricity of Oblivion is totally absent from a track like this. Nothing in the sound of this album would be weird/unfamiliar/alienating to average pop listeners

The "dreamy eccentricity" of "Oblivion" was totally its crossover selling point though. It always struck me as pretty likely that "Oblivion" (19.6m youtube views) would enjoy a very similar brand of success as Robyn's "Dancing On My Own" (18.3m youtube views), and certainly it fulfills a similar function as a dancefloor staple at a certain type of house party.

"Pin" is amazing, but I don't know what context it fits into, it's so busy and dense and gloriously self-impatient. I doubt it would alienate listeners, but it doesn't necessarily fulfill a role for groups of listeners either.

the janelle monae song is kind of a clunker

as usual

Flesh Without Blood feels the most like an alternate universe hit. Don't think she has much interest in being a producer/writer for anyone else now though from what she's said in interviews recently

In 2015 pop stars rly need to be able to pull it off live

If you don't hear the big difference btw demo and album Realiti like why do you even care much what music you listen to

It's like Tim got his hands on one of Al's "by the book" projects and hot rodded the damn thing. And we know the bones of that song can't handle the hot shot synth sound and JTT is bound to crack wise in the kitchen later but the chaos is more interesting.

idk about u but i am extremely undiscriminating, everything sounds the same to me. that's why i like all the music i've ever heard except the majority of this album.

xps uhm I guess I didn't mean "sincere" in some totally dated or lame way...

I meant (but not able to listen now and confirm my intuitions) that the vocals on realiti demo had some kind of melancholy vibe combined with etheral vocals, as if grimes is singing from some detached place high in the sky, musing on contemporary existence and spleen or whatever, and the album version is more in line with what I hear as general playfulness of singing on album, which works great on the other songs but imo takes away a bit of the urgency on the demo delivery

I also like the demo instrumental better

I hear the "Welcome to reality" in the demo as very serious and almost zen, like bjork throwing rubbish off the mountaintop, whereas the deliberately cutesy performance of that line on the album is very ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Both work but they give very different resonances to the song.

The two versions of Realiti aren't very different as songs but the performance and arrangement leave a totally different impression. Like the album version is so much perkier, there's a sadness to the way she sings the chorus in the demo. It's also a good example of why technically 'better' production doesn't always improve a song - a lot of the elements that add the crunch and rhythmic distinctiveness to the demo are still there in the album version, but they're mixed way down and are just elements floating around in the overall swirl of sound.

I think what I mean upthread is that the newer vocal is kind of mocking the sentiment of the demo. This was one of the tracks left on the shelf when she decided the album draft was too depressing and not where she wanted to go, so it's kind of a parody reading as a means of putting distance between the new and the old. As several posters above mention, there is a lot of arch, playful, throwaway vocal work - "Kill V. Maim" is like four-way bickering between Disney and Pokémon characters.

What the album version reminds me of:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-PYqUHfTMA

this album is god damn amazing

'california' tripped me up when i first heard it and some of the early neg reactions in this thread tempered my expectations. but now i'm just, completely hooked on this shit. i really needed this album to be good cause i overdosed on visions too hard & can't really listen to it anymore, so grateful its a masterpiece