Grimes - Visions

When I heard Grimes’ debut LP Geidi Primes last year, it did very little for me. The thing had an intruging sound, I’ll grant it that, but the tracks often felt like fifteen second samples of potentially great songs, repeated and repeated to the point of redundancy - to the point of outright annoyance, even. Accordingly, despite her prolific rate of output since (dropping another LP and a split record in the short window before this third full album), I’ve given her a pretty wide berth.

That is until I heard early Visions’ single ‘Genesis’, and it sounded like she’d cracked it; preserving the idiocentric and recognisable sound of those early songs, but marrying it to a much sharper focus on song structure and development. The swirling keyboard arpeggios and programmed beats melting from under each other, suddenly and subtly shifting focuses, all the while Boucher’s vocal dancing across the top, selling hook after (different) hook. Here we have desperately needed variety in texture and melody - and all utterly addictive. And the front end of Visions is littered with a few of these beacons of sharper focus and killer pop instinct. ‘Oblivion’, for example, shimmers along on a string of effortlessly glimmering hooks; while the fabulous ‘Vowels = space and time’ sports an intoxicating chorus of breathless, excited and loved up delivery.

However, somewhere around the midpoint of Visions, it loses its equilibrium quite drastically: the songs becoming subservient to their ‘sound’; the substance of the album becoming secondary to its ‘feel’. At the more forgivable end of the spectrum are songs like ‘Circumambient’ which, after carving out a solid verse, stumbles into something approaching a chorus before collapsing in a complete mess of self-sabotage - a bleepy, skipping, fucked calamity which feels like Boucher lost her nerve for pop, and is being wilfully anarchic just to be antagonistic.

At the worse end of the spectrum, however, by the time we reach stuff like ‘Colour Of Moonlight (Antiochus)’ Boucher has regressed towards the stylings of her debut, repeating a snatch of melody to a dead beat, creating something more like a mantra than a song. And by this point in the record, the thing has turned into something of an electronic mush, where six minute slowburners and sixty second interludes bleed into one other (in spite of  flowing into each other somewhat awkwardly), drifting by in what feels like identical running lengths, difficult to distinguish between. The vocal layering of heavily filtered ‘oohs’ and ‘ah-ha-has’ have become the foreground, not the textural detail strengthening central melodies.

None of this is to take away from the frequent moments of brilliance littered across Visions, of course. The strong melodies and breathy falsetto performances of songs like ‘Genesis’ and ‘Circumambient’ teasingly entice us with the fruits of what happens when Boucher really goes diva, translating her cited admiration of Mariah Carey into an obvious - and welcome - influence. But at thirteen tracks long, Visions is an album which feels like it could do with some heavy editing, spreading its ideas thinly over too many songs.

Boucher’s strongest suits are as a relatively conservative songwriter as well as a pop vocalist, and Visions hits its peaks when she plays to these strengths straightforwardly. But it sadly frequently misses the mark - such as with the irritatingly repetitive and thinly sketched tracks recalling her debut, or with more promising songs sounding like they once boasted tightly focused pop melodies, before Boucher slashed them to death in a misjudged effort to cultivate a sound rather than create a song. It's the bona fide songs which shine brightest on Visions, and provide the strongest reason to anticipate whatever's coming next from Grimes.