Originally Posted by
Mantra
It's weird how the very thing that you love about an artist can sometimes flip, where that exact same quality now comes across as a negative thing.
I was thinking about this recently while revisiting Tricky's whole catalog and observing his music's steady decline beginning after Angels With Dirty Faces. Certain descriptions could be applied to his later music that could also be applied to the old stuff (dark, atmospheric, blending hiphop/pop/rock, and so on), but he began executing that concept in a way that fundamentally changed the way it came across to people, and you could just feel it. No one but the most die-hard dickriders can reasonably argue that post-90s Tricky is anywhere near as good as 90s Tricky. With Grimes I feel like something similar is starting to happen. What I've always loved about her music is this very earnest ADHD quality. It felt like she was having so much fun just making noise and trying weird things and dabbling in whatever whims she felt in that moment. The idea of her music being a modern day meeting ground between aphex twin and mariah carey was kind of absurd, and yet she often did a decent enough job pulling it off. Plus she seemed kinda wild and crazy, climbing mountains while tripping on acid, swimming naked in the ocean, building that crazy house-boat contraption to float down the Mississippi river with live chickens on board. The girl is fucking NUTS. But that fun, reckless quality seemed to translate well into her songs. I remember reading about how she wrote one of her older songs in less than an hour (I think it was Feyd Rautha Dark Heart) after she took a shitload of acid and just poured herself into it as fast as she could. There's a kind of purity to that. She was always manic and weird, but somehow, at her very best, it was like she was able to harness all that craziness and channel it into genuinely good songs.
On paper, this new album seems to bear all the same descriptors of her old music: it's weird, eclectic, poppy, hyperactive, fun, dark, etc. And yet something feels off to me. The AAA production values give all the songs a certain crude and garish quality, even the stronger songs. When I compare the new studio version of Realiti to the original demo that we all fell in love with, it doesn't hold up as well. The song is fundamentally great, so it's still enjoyable enough, but something has definitely been lost, something in the underlying feeling of it.
Relistening to her older shit this morning and then playing the new album again, I'm realizing that, in spite of how wild and manic she used to be, there was actually an under-acknowledged sense of subtly and restraint in her music, especially her best songs. Her pop songs didn't exactly have epic choruses, but they had a enough pop tendencies to hold your attention, and when she mixed that with a certain blissed out/pure quality, it ended up working really, really well. I'm specifically thinking of songs like Be a Body, Night Music, the Realiti demo, Crystal Ball, Genesis, and others. It's funny how much of a deal was made about her failed attempts at writing pop songs for other mainstream artists, because it actually doesn't surprise me at all. Grimes pop songs just do not sound like Rhianna pop songs. Stadium pop singers wouldn't touch a song like Realiti or Be a Body, because the pop elements are so abstracted, not just by the ethereal production style (which could changed if needed) but by the actual song composition itself. This hasn't really changed. Flesh Without Blood may have a certain Taylor Swift-esq level of pop-rock production, but there's still no chorus as gripping as Shake It Off. This wasn't really an issue when the songs were presented with cooler production and a much better sense of overall style and atmosphere, but she seems to be shedding all of that and exchanging it for something that doesn't complement her music nearly as well. I think if she were trying to write Oblivion today the song would get kinda fucked up in her new process, which I suspect is the reason that there's not a single track on this album that's as good as Oblivion.
It's a bummer because I genuinely feel that Grimes has an endless amount of future potential, and as someone who was excited to hear all the music that she was going to bring into existence, I hope she can clear her head a bit and make something better again. It would be kind of tragic if this was it. It makes want to go through her archive of unreleased material to see if any other Realiti-level demos are being left unreleased because of some bizarre sense of taste.
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