All posts tagged: Grimes

Well That Was Metal: Grimes – “Art Angels” album review

Claire Boucher, aka Grimes, is the spokesperson for a certain type of sad girl/boy. They probably have a Tumblr and/or Instagram. They may or may not have non-organic colored hair. They are creative, and don’t feel like they fit in anywhere. Except, at this point, there are a lot of us. Grimes’ shot-heard-round-the-world, 2012’s Visions, trickled from the underground like a demon-possessed river of bubbling crude. You can practically hear the obsession, feel the strain of late nights half-bent over a Macbook screwing beats into corkscrews of twisted metal and regret. Visions came out of nowhere, and went everywhere. How does Claire Boucher follow-up, with 3 years absence and a million expectations to fulfill? What happens when the World’s Most Misunderstood Artist is also the world’s most popular? “California”, the first song on Art Angels with discernible lyrics, tackles this paradox head-on. “California, you only like me when I’m sad,” she sings. It’s a properly miserablist sentiment, but the music is bright, bold, powerful, and direct. art angels: album cover. music & video next week …

Nicole Dollanganger – Natural Born Losers review

Stoufville, Ontario’s Nicole Dollanganger delivers a dark, sweet mumblecore folk record for Grimes’ new imprint, Eerie Organization. It’s hard not to draw comparisons between Nicole Dollanganger’s atmospheric folk-tinted bedroom rock and Harmony Korine’s filmography. On Natural Born Losers, there’s “A Marvelous Persona”, a nod to Gummo’s larger-than-life bad boy Tummler, he of the marvelous persona. Dollanganger has previously referenced Korine’s directorial debut, following “Bunny Boy” from 2014’s BabyLand, along with a haunting homage to Beverly Marsh from Stephen King’s “It”. Bunny boys, cool losers, battered heroines haunted by abusive fathers and homicidal shape-shifting clowns, all of these images would be at home in a Nicole Dollanganger record. Like Korine’s work, there is nothing all that ominous and unsettling on the surface of Dollanganger’s ghostly folk music. Korine’s movies focus on the lives of the fringe dwellers – trailer park denizens and celebrity impostors. Korine shows the darkness and desperation of “normal people” eking out an existence, but not as some morality tale. The darkness is just a shade and texture, like a cloud passing across …