Tuesday 16 April 2013


Top 20 albums of 2012 #5: Grimes - Visions

I still don’t know exactly what to make of 'Visions', the third album from Vancouverite hipster,Grimes. Other than it is brilliant. I still don’t know what to make about Claire Boucher’s strange creative process of locking herself in a room with no food, sleep or company (although one imagines plenty of creative inducing morsels were somehow involved) in order to free her mind and fill in the gaps where music should be. But it worked spectacularly because Visions is close to the top, if not at the top, of every 2012 ‘best of’ list.
No matter how many times you listen to Visions it’s still baffling in its depth, beauty and complete otherworldliness; new supernatural sounds lodge themselves in the back of your head, gnawing away at your subconscious until they jump out at you, making you wonder how you’d never heard them before. The alluring sense of not being able to place the album in any sub-genre of pop is a treat the can be enjoyed over and over. What is it? Lo-fi? R&B? Electro-pop? Kooky-weirdo-hovering around the ether-pop? Does anyone care? Probably not. But it’s the sense of something new and different that makes it so great.
And it’s fun. You’d be hard to come across a better single than 'Oblivion' in 2012. The hypnotic early-90s techno computer-synth thuds a perfect accompaniment to Boucher’s child-like melody. Listening to it is like being a kid again, gleefully playing 'Streets of Rage' on the Mega Drive for the first time and wondering why the baddies all have blue hair.
The whole album is a throwback to the raw sounds of the early 90s but with enough mod cons to bring it alarmingly to 2012 – think Vowels = Space and Time and Visiting Statue. It does what all good music should; it brings a sense of nostalgia whilst also paving a way forward for new memories or experiences.
Visions will always be lodged securely in my mind as a soundtrack to change, the various strange noises generating an insatiable excitement for life. Plus it also has that infectious vibe and buzz that causes your body to go into bouts of fitful movements, contagious in its ability to make you want to dance.
By . Tweets at @herbert_sam

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