'Art Angels' A Magical Stylistic Mashup

Grimes’s latest album, “Art Angels,” was faced with a number of wildly different and often contradictory expectations. The album—the fourth for Grimes, the music project of Claire Boucher—follows her critically-acclaimed breakthrough third release “Visions” and faces the challenges more typical to those of a debut follow-up. It is Boucher’s first album since signing to major management, Roc Nation, but it is still released on independent label 4AD and is meant to appeal to two different, if overlapping, audiences: both the indie rock world that embraced her in 2012 for “Visions” and the pop world, in which Boucher is moving, with stylistic ambiguity, toward stardom. “Art Angels” has come after an eons-long wait in pop terms—a whole three years since “Visions”—during which time Boucher apparently wrote and scrapped an entirely different album. Somehow, magically, marvelously, the album lives up to all these difficult, different expectations, and on Boucher’s fiercely independent, unorthodox terms. It is a true triumph.

The album opens with “laughing and not being normal,” which could only be termed a string overture. It features an itchy and insistent cinematic string and piano arrangement over which Boucher sings in a ghostly falsetto. The opening track beautifully sets the stage for an album that both reaffirms the vocal stylings for which Boucher is known and serves as a radical departure from her oeuvre—she is certainly not identified as an expert arranger of strings.While deeply connected to her previous work, “Art Angels” is also something powerfully radical and new.

While Boucher’s previous three albums were clearly inspired, in part, by elements of pop music, “Art Angels” is the most thorough embrace of the genre. Many of the tracks on the album—all entirely composed and produced by Boucher—have new studio sheen. There is a deep vein of bubblegum that runs through the album, and tracks like “California,” “Flesh without Blood,” “Artangels,” and “Butterfly” explore a more sugared sonic territory than Boucher has previously ventured into. For all their sweetness, though, these songs are undercut with real grit and well, grime. “California,” which sounds like it was co-composed by two very different California girls—Katy and Joni—pairs breezy beach pop with melancholic lyrics. “Flesh without Blood,” the album’s big pop single, uses the framework of a “Since U Been Gone”-ish break-up track to discuss Boucher’s move toward the pop mainstream—she sings from the perspective of a jilted fan, giving voice to criticisms of the album with lines like, “Your voice, it had the perfect glow / It got lost when you gave it up though / Cause you want money / You want fame.” Underneath its seemingly straightforward surface, it is a bizarre, disorienting listen—a perfectly Boucher take on pop. It pairs nicely with the album’s closing track, “Butterfly,” in which Boucher, addressing these same critics, sings cutely if cuttingly, “If you’re looking for a dream girl / I’ll never be your dream girl.”

Not all of the pop styling that Boucher explores is similarly sugared—“Kill V. Maim” and “Realiti” stand out as tracks that have obvious mainstream influence but are of a less sweet variety. “Kill V. Maim,” which Boucher described in an interview with Q Magazine as being about Al Pacino from “The Godfather: Part. 2,” “except he’s a vampire who can switch gender and travel through space,” features a darker, more intense sound backing track over which Boucher delivers a vocally virtuosic genre- and gender-defying performance. “Realiti,” which Boucher released as a demo last spring to much adoration, has a shimmering, truly gorgeous sound. It is a stunningly lovely listen.

Two of the best tracks on the album, “SCREAM” and “Venus Fly,” feature Boucher collaborating with other artists—in the former, Aristophanes, a Taiwanese rapper, pants, howls, hisses, screams, and, yes, spits, over a sonically dark and viscerally intense Boucher-produced track. In the latter, Boucher and Janelle Monae, the high priestess of cyborg pop, deliver a sharp rebuke of scopophilia over a backing track so jamming that, when Boucher drops in some Celtic fiddling halfway through, the song is only improved for it. It is a wonderfully fierce, powerfully anthemic, liberatory listen, and, unsurprisingly for a Boucher-Monae collaboration, it is thoroughly danceable.

“Art Angels” is a dense, multilayered, multifaceted album with a stunningly diverse array of influences. In the final track on the album, “Butterfly,” Boucher sings, “harmony is everywhere.” Throughout the album, she convincingly substantiates this claim. Boucher draws inspiration and influence from across genre, weaving together disparate yet surprisingly resonant elements from a segmented, heterogeneous musical landscape. In straddling seemingly contrary musical worlds, Grimes, in her own pop-tastic and iconoclastic way, makes a case for the polymorphic and pluralistic, finding unexpected overlaps, continuities, intersections, and harmonies.

—Staff writer Amy J. Cohn can be reached at amy.cohn@thecrimson.com