Grimes/Claire Boucher thread

It's just... It doesn't make me doubt my judgement over Grimes. But it does make me rethink my areas of agreement with Lex's taste, which generally do overlap and have a lot of common ground. Bah stupid meta, will shut up now.

i think it's obvious that she has a good, powerful singing voice and this is one of the first recent indie albums i've heard where manipulating the vocals or choosing not to sing 'traditionally' really works for it -- she's not attempting to mask or hide any sort of vocal deficiency, but a lot of times it's like you're trying to reach out and grab these great hooks or melodies that aren't pushed to the forefront... but for like the entire album. again tho i think it works because she can sing.

i think there's something narcotic about the album but not in the super obvious way that, idk, jj or the weeknd go for 'narcotic'

J0rdan otm. She isn't just setting a superficial mood; the songs penetrate much deeper than that

i'm not saying she *can't* sing, i'm saying the way she chooses to sing doesn't work. there's nothing to latch on to.

i'm pretty much coming in here b/c most people in here are the people i usually talk to all the time and mostly agree with so it's the extra WTF are you hearing in this boring music factor.

j0rdan otm itt

That's it, Jordan. she's a hugely skilled vocalist and everything she is doing to her voice, the treatments, the odd tonality, seems completely thought out and deliberate. You can dislike what she's doing, but implying she's doing it out of lack of skill rather than choice is just wilfully negative.

So much of that chipmunk voice and baby-cooing seems like a deliberate parody or reducto ad absurdum of the quality of ~Femininity~ and fragility. And guess what - the other woman that really plays with that contrast between pretty-voice delicacy / fragility and chopped up aggressive music is St Vincent, who Lex also hates.

So it's becoming more apparent to me what it that Lex dislikes in both of them. Though obviously I disagree.

*yanks rope on bus*

Explain, please. You're probably just shaking your head at that comment haha

i'm pretty much coming in here b/c most people in here are the people i usually talk to all the time and mostly agree with so it's the extra WTF are you hearing in this boring music factor.

― lex pretend, Wednesday, April 4, 2012 1:16 PM (15 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Except this happens, without fail, 3 or 4 times yearly. People who mostly share your taste will occasionally like things you don't, and berating us for being wrong just makes us all grumpy. We're not the people who are ignoring the things you're loving - we're going nuts about Dawn and Kalenna and everyone else - and we're not going out of our way to try to sell you on things that we know you don't like after you give them an honest shot. I dunno. It just feels like an unproductive conversation, because you're not likely to be convinced, because what a lot of us are valuing here are part of an aesthetic framework that you actively don't like.

Normally, I'm all about back and forth to try to figure out what makes something work for me and not for somebody else, especially when so much of our taste tends to overlap, but we've done this enough times that I already know how the conversation plays out, so why not save yourself the stress and rage and just ignore the thread and we can get excited about Teedra or Jade Alston or Nicki somewhere else without hitting all of our heads against the wall?

i'm trying to think of fragile-voiced female singers i love...cassie obv. ashanti too. latter-day mariah when she goes cooey and breathy? stina nordenstam obv! anja garbarek to a limited extent. nordenstam and garbarek can write hooks though.

don't think i ever got round to disliking st vincent's voice specifically due to hating the production so much, but it didn't grab me for sure.

'Visions' has been a grower for me, as much as I loved it from day one. I was worried that the glossier polish and more 'song'-like songs would eliminate some of her ramshackle charm but there are so many more hooks buried in this - I'm not sure if I agree with rennavate re: 'Love King' but I do think his description is on point wrt the album being a constant stream of mini-hooks that sometimes integrate into songs and sometimes don't.

I'm curious what j0rdan and Evan and folk would think of her live show. The vocals are still manipulated and fragile to some extent, but there's more belting and more power in the beats. It's much more of a dance-oriented show than the album would suggest.

also, her dj set at the afterparty was all remixes of Mariah's 'Obsessed' and turn of the millenium r'n'b

"but I do think his description is on point wrt the album being a constant stream of mini-hooks that sometimes integrate into songs and sometimes don't."

ya that's what i mean. i don't mean that it's actually like/as good as love king.

I know this drives you nuts, Lex, but I think a lot of us here appreciate Grimes more than so many similarly styled electro-pop acts precisely because we do hear a little more R&B in her. And the way she appropriates the genre doesn't seem subtle or exploitative to me; she's pretty clever about it. I think your overarching bias against all non-traditional displays of R&B prevents you from taking that same enjoyment away from it, though, so it's kind of a lost cause. Which is a shame, because this otherwise seems like something you could love, too.

It's much more of a dance-oriented show than the album would suggest.

More power live is never a bad thing in my book, even if the subtleties I love on the record get lost. I'm actually going to Pitchfork this year pretty much for the sole purpose of seeing her live; hope it's good.

I think your overarching bias against all non-traditional displays of R&B

that doesn't exist (see enjoyment of creep, kingdom etc passim)

i wouldn't have associated grimes with r&b at all if you lot hadn't talked about it.

also, for the thousandth time, good taste when djing is not correlated to being a worthwhile musician at all. fucking bloc party can dj a banging set of 90s dance but they should still kill themselves before recording another note of their own material

It's funny because although I do hear traces of especially Mariah Carey in her vocal treatment, the thing she reminds me most strongly of is that "etherial girl" thing so beloved of 4AD in the late 80s / early 90s.

That kind of babyish ethereal girl singing voice, I later loved on people like Tanya Donelly of Belly/Throwing Muses and hated on her out of Blake Babies (Juliana Whatsit?) and then you had people like Miki Berenyi and Alison Cranes who took that style and completely subverted it, like it was no longer cutesy anime girl but became this edge of slightly psychotic and demented behind all the pretty.

Take this voice which could be a doll, but turn it into a mad child in the attic with a knife.

Grimes seems like she is both playing the Ethereal Girl and at the same time, ripping the archetype to pieces in a really (to my ears) interesting way. But if you read it as straight girly-girl I would find it infuriating.

the thing she reminds me most strongly of is that "etherial girl" thing so beloved of 4AD in the late 80s / early 90s.

only a few tracks in myself but whatever it's worth this seems blatantly, painfully obvious

i'm sure a big r&b ballad is only a song away tho

also no offence but never speak of mariah ever again

hmm maybe it is slightly more 80s pop styling than just simply 4ad indie but i can't quite recall the singer i'm thinking of specifically

there are some moments esp on "vowels" that are much closer to being 'wispy' the way 90s Mariah was than whatever 'wispy' singing lex was referring to

also another thing about this album is that if you told me it was produced by john talabot I would believe you

You gonna laugh but there are moments that her productions and harmonies remind me so much of 80s Prince, but that might just be there's a song (sorry don't know titles, I listen to this when I'm jogging) which has almost exactly the same drum sounds and beat as When Doves Cry. Could be my shitty earbuds though.

But mostly it's 4AD 4-track weirdoes with a Reason DAW. It has as much His Name Is Alive and Danielle Dax in it as Mariah Carey.

But, you know, LOL signifiers. I thought one of the songs on Halfaxa sounded like Republica, what so I know?

Better sound palette than Talabot. More Germanic, too. This reminds me of Cluster with Orbital-1994-era Alison Goldfrapp singing over it.

But wtf do I know. I really like it, though.

Every person who listens to this record seems to bring an intensely hears set of signifiers and reference points to it - and they're all completely different.

Which probably means she is actually quite unique? I honestly can't think of much that sounds exactly like this so I'm always reaching, and it's possible she's never heard any of the things I project onto her voice.

Intensely heard. I Fucken hate this iPhone.

My knowledge of rnb is practically zero, so, y'know. We all have different analogues.

the only thing i know about grimes other than seeing the name on the internet on occasion was being a conversation behind me at the liquor store the other day:

guy a: "hey, you have to check out this album i think you might like it. they're called grimes..."
guy b: "already have it"
(divergence off into conversation about turntable.fm)
guy c: "you guys play some really boring stuff in that room"
guys a + b: "..."
me: (stifling guffaw as i pay cashier)

FFS it doesn't even SOUND LIKE Talabot and certainly doesn't use better sounds

To your ears, dude.

Me, I can't for the life of me hear what anyone likes in Talabot. I find it so banal and lifeless.

That's why there's chocolate and vanilla.

The difference is, I gave up w Talabot and I don't spend hours haranguing ppl on his thread saying they should be listening to, like, Grimes instead.

FFS it doesn't even SOUND LIKE Talabot and certainly doesn't use better sounds

― lex pretend, Wednesday, 4 April 2012 19:36 (22 minutes ago) Bookmark

srsly, 4 the luv of god

Yeah, I love Talabot but Visions, doesn't remind me at all of him, so I'm with lex on that, at least.

i haven't listened to this album but the video of her doing genesis alone in a room w a table of pedals has been obsessing me for the last week or so.

the "oblivion" video is even better!

im sorry about this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3iAoxHb8B8

i think the bit that really started to sink in for me was the part where she's singing what sounds like "my heart" over and over. there's a moment where she goes "my-Y heaart" (its like 1:59 in the video if you're interested) and it has this feeling of being chopped up in pro-tools but you see her do it there in front of you, just this slight vocal affectation. i mean its not the niftiest of tricks, and its hard to bring it up without making it seem like you want it to be read like so many iterations of the body imitating the machine. there's this strategy of incorporation that i think is working in this album. these layers of signification being compressed. her voice overlaid with the ghost of its machine alteration. this particular synthesis. (its hard for me to think of without remembering that she is roughly the same age as me, grew up singing along to productions by guys who first encountered this as a nifty studio gimmick.)

i'm not being clear. i think though, that this approach definitely bleeds into what she's doing elsewhere. the vocals can sound intimate and alien and naked and elusive. the lyrics that turn into vapor. smoke weed and listen to mariah. a whole set of associations that can be tapped into in all these oblique ways. lateral steps along a chain of signification. its connected with the collapse of the chillwave project i guess. she is a post-anco popstar for sure. all those haunted houses of pop songs. and yeah vowels = space and time. all this negative space, something missing at the centre.

how hard it is to feel things, presumably

attach judith's comment to tim's comment about it being "music commenting on its own making" but even to the point where i think the making is semi-erased (thus the "something missing at the centre") and it's all otm to me

also the persistent criticism i encounter of this record is that is sounds "unfinished" or "like demos," which, okay, it definitely doesn't sound like that to me, but considering that, what would make this sound more "complete" necessarily? someone upthread said they imagine drum parts in this record where there are none. i think that is a totally legitimate way to love music, to fill in spaces yourself. it's an interaction, not a closed system. like hearing music faintly, from another room, how other parts are summoned that are not necessarily part of the music but are not totally your own making either

Brilliant album but let's not try to explain it via R&B perhaps. Still think mid-80s Happy Rhodes is the best comparison point:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_F9mg0wmBUk

The part of Lex's crusade that I disagree with most (while recognising this is a subjective measure) is the "no hooks" measure - this album is like hooks on hooks.

Making this more "complete" would ruin it for me.

i don't recognise the "unfinished" way of listening to music at all - i can't say i've ever experienced music like that.

the "no hooks" argument is my strongest, everything else is trying to justify it retrospectively but what it comes down to is that it goes in one ear and out the other, and i have given it waaaaay more chances than things like that normally get. it doesn't stick at all.

There's nothing I can say to that but, it sticks to my head like crazy. Even though they are insane pitched riffs that I couldn't possibly sing along with.

xpost I believe you, it just seems bizarre to me because I feel my number one reason for liking this album is its kaleidoscope of hooks. The songs don't feel unfinished to me at all, but really generous, like she's offering more ideas than she needs to in each song. The way the songs are filled with this winning little shifts and switch-ups vocally/sonically/melodically. It also means it withstands repeat playing a lot more.

winning little shifts and switch-ups

otm

fwiw the R&B connection doesnt really resonate for me, like, i believe its there, but it doesnt really operate like R&B for me & i dont think thats key to understanding or enjoying it

how hard it is to feel things, presumably

― r|t|c, Wednesday, April 4, 2012 9:38 PM (Yesterday)

lol thank you for checking out the course reader