He has often expressed his life experience in such a frank manner, its difficult to see beyond it to notice how he's filtered and packaged it for our consumption. The results process his feelings via some of the most honest, witty, yet scathing songs about former lovers you are ever likely to hear. Emotional truths struck home and cause reciprocal resonant chords in others -'yes me too'. Anyone who has broken up badly with a former lover and wanted to get back at them for the hurt they've caused, could hear it in a John Grant song. Much of this early solo material arose from a precarious sense of himself, to which the songs became a sort of cathartic therapy. Trying to rid himself of layers of self- destructive hate, doubt and anger. Over his three previous albums and associated live performances it was apparent that Grant has gradually been putting to rest, or at least managing better, the bitterness that drove his most cutting early songwriting. Where too now though for the bard of the withering put down?
As he releases Love is Magic, his fourth solo album, what more can we hear that hasn't been heard before? As Bella Union pre-released tracks from the album online, I felt concerned. What I was hearing, seemed like retreading old ground, a lost sense for a melodic line, run out of fresh ways to write songs? Grant himself thinks this album is the most complete realisation he's yet achieved of what he's wanted an album to be. My feelings about it before hearing it in full were then a little troublesome. I was surprised then to end up loving it.
Queen of Denmark released in 2010 was in effect a salvage job by the group Midlake, to rescue Grant from slipping into a self imposed retirement. The resulting highly successful album has much more of a country lite feel to it, and had echoes of his previous work in the Csars. By the time of Pale Green Ghosts, three years later he's confident about where he wants to go musically experimenting with electronics, though still dropping back into the style of the first album from to time to time. This gave the album stylistically speaking an uneven feel, even though its full of songs that are some of his best. My sense of 2015's Grey Tickles & Black Pressure was that it consolidated without developing further what he achieved on Pale Green Ghosts. With Love Is Magic, I believe I have a sense of what he's tried to achieve with this album. Its is more coherent in its form, being largely electronic in style from start to finish, but it also toys with something a bit more sonically adventurous too.
Between the last two albums he's done quite a bit of feature vocals on other people's albums. Most noticeably on Susanne Sundfor's Mountaineers, and with Creep Show. Both these allow Grant to sing over the most gorgeous sonic backgrounds allowing space to accommodate the full richness of his vocal timbre. Susanne Sundfor's album Music For Troubled Times, is a patchwork of songs each beautifully wrought. At times sparsely backed, sometimes lushly orchestrated, experimentalally mixing in the spoken word, whilst still hanging together as a whole album concept. Love is Magic bears a few similarities, there are re-statements of what is good in a John Grant song, whilst weaving into this bolder explorations of the song form, pushing at his own compositional boundaries. The track Metamorphosis for instance opens the album with a crazy in your face list of things that appear to have no association, bookending a sad little tune about the death of a loved one, written from the perspective of someone with an emotionally alienated sense of loss. It doesn't quite convince you to fully buy into whats happening, its a fraction too clever to touch you, but it is a courageous track to open your album with.
The theme that holds the album together, resides in the title track Love Is Magic. Laying out the different reasons for our experience and desire for love. He sings that however it arrives ' when the door opens up for you, don't resist just walk on through, there's really nothing else to do.' Since an earlier song Marz there's has been a nostalgic vein that reflects back on his early life. Its present here in the Tempest, where he yearns for someone to come play the Atari arcade game with him. It has within it a plangent vein of loneliness, requesting someone to come and share an enthusiasm with him, to love what he loves. Preppy Boy, is a young inexperienced gay teenager imagining himself falling for the most straight looking and hence unobtainable love object. Smug Cunt could be seen as another of Grant's character assassinations of a hate figure. But there is often a sense that Grant only dislikes them because they have what he wants, the Smug Cunt has unwarrented self-confidence, but by the bucketful. Diet Gum, opens with the line 'I manipulate, that's what I do, I manipulate that's what I'm doing to you' interspersed with a lot of gay bitching trying to put down the manipulator 'Do you really think you could seduce me in a leisure suit' . Yet these pathetic expressions of independence are empty ones. They are only susceptible to being manipulated, because they love the manipulator.
Critical appreciation for this album has been mixed, some have like me loved it, often for the very same things that others have found irritating. Sometimes, I have to say, Grant's use of electronic instrumentation can seem a bit like he switched the machine on and used whatever its factory default settings were. He needs a musical collaborator to push him to be bolder in his arrangements, someone who'll conceive a unique sound to enhance Grants songs further. That said, Love Is Magic's compositional themes are as rounded and thoughtful as ever. It still has its pokey moments, but in a gentler, less cruel way, and he is perhaps more forgiving of others failings than before. Though not quite the superlative album that one might still expect him to write, it points towards a few bold musical directions he could pursue and expand on further. Nonetheless, for all its sometimes half resolved quirkiness, its a really interesting album that I'm already quite besotted with.
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