GRIMES - Visions

Behind the moniker Grimes hides Claire Boucher, a Canadian artist who joined the 4AD roster on the strength of a couple of records that did their job around the web, spreading her name far and wide.

In her layered electro-pop digressions, polished to a shine by a production that knows exactly how to amplify the strengths and hide as many of the flaws as possible, “Visions” offers dream-pop suggestions wrapped in a thoroughly plasticky synthetic shell – “Oblivion”, “Colour Of Moonlight (Antiochus)” – and robotic edges (“Eight”), classical-leaning hints that peek out beyond the heavenly mechanics of techno (“Nightmusic”), and confessions in the form of a magnetic, evanescent ballad (“Skin”). Then, on “Genesis”, you suddenly find yourself cruising down the autobahn of Kraftwerk…

Boucher's voice is always in projection, continually displaced, pushed toward parallel dimensions from which it's only possible to keep flirting with the magic of a melancholy transfigured into a crystal-clear daydream. It skips and withdraws (“Circumambient”), toys with the most frivolous side of the Eighties, clinging to a glossy melodicism that evidently owes something to the thinness of much mainstream female pop (“Vowels = Space and Time”, among others).

Retro-futurism is still a hypothesis to work on – “Be A Body (侘寂)” – so it's better to focus on the purest enchantment of an elegiac, soul-deep round dance set against a backdrop of dazzling stars – “Symphonia IX (My Wait Is U)”.

And yet, round and round it goes, you always end up back in a vicious circle, surrounded by glitter that dazzles way beyond measure in an attempt to distract you from the thinness of the ideas on display.

In short, the usual crafty, calculated record aimed at an undemanding audience.

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06/03/2012