Art Angels

Art Angels is made of the same dark candy, with even more weird and wonderful flavour combinations. I began to think of songs as three-minute gobstoppers in which layers dissolved unexpectedly.

It’s impossible to resist the instant, limb-grabbing appeal of the pop music Grimes is making here, and dizzyingly big, this is a record about shaking off every constraint, and wrenching hold of reality with both fists.

Grimes has given us a complete record that's everything pop should be in 2015: utterly uncompromising, imaginative and, somehow, universally accessible.

Art Angels is the maximalist brainchild of a prodigious talent. It’s hugely entertaining. It’s delightfully bizarre. It’s refreshingly caustic.

Art Angels is a major victory for deep weird.

Art Angels is us listening to personal triumph. Grimes has found her voice literally through the music.

After Visions, the only thing Grimes could do was to grow as big as the landscape around her. Here’s her mountain.

It’s slick and gritty, fun and funny, and horrifying and grotesque all at once. It will also make you shake your ass like nothing else.

In the fiercely competitive pop world, the coalescence of earworm melodies, lush production, and dynamic performances is usually the unlikely result of an ensemble effort of high-salaried professionals; alone, Boucher beats them at their own game and then some with one of the most rebellious, uncommonly bizarre records of the young post-modern pop era.

Art Angels is a marvel of meticulous, even obsessive home-studio recording, uncompromised by bandmates or collaborators.

The first half of the album follows one knockout punch with another, with guitar-centric melodies underpinned by glitchy electronics that have more in common with 1980s post-punk and early industrial music than they do the pop mainstream.

What's most exciting within Art Angels is the sheer will and fearlessness of Boucher's fight to be heard and seen on her own terms.

Visions put Grimes on the map as pop's pure misfit but Art Angels secured her tangible place as the genre's most unconventional star. For those that doubted, she's done that thing she does, but better. More defined.

Art Angels wipes the fog from her lens and lays out her vision, clear and uncompromising.

Claire Boucher's fourth album is wilder, more ambitious, and--at least on the surface--more accessible than her breakthrough

Crackling with radio-primed hooks, whipsnap breakbeats and Boucher’s helium-pitched vocals, Grimes’ third album makes a convincing strike for playlist ubiquity, with a healthy dollop of the oddball chucked in.

You can sense the deceptively complex Art Angels will only continue to yield further depths with time. [Jan 2016, p.76]

She’s self aware and independent. She proves pop doesn’t have to be drab and, instead, can be thoughtful and boundary pushing. Art Angels exists for those who love pop but even more so for those who actively avoid it.

It’s not so much that she’s changed direction completely, as that she’s drained her art of the obfuscating sonic blabber to leave her pop aesthetic.

With pacing like a serial manga franchise, the album shines through its relentless ability to grow on you, despite all odds.

In its ability to appeal to so many listeners, while being as thrilling on its first spin as it is on its fifteenth, Art Angels is likely to emerge from 2015 as one of the most universally adored albums of the year.

Where Visions looked inward--sounding like the echo of your voice inside your skull--Art Angels blasts relentlessly outward; an unabashed pleasure seeking missile that blurs the lines between euphoria and the nauseating sickness of excess.

Grimes manages to face mounting hype with a skillful redefinition of boundaries. It may be new territory, but she's navigating it pretty damn well.

In her willingness to tread the line between the crushing flood of data and irrepressible pop hooks has created a record so undeniably of its time and place (that is, cyberspace) that it can’t be easily ignored.

Art Angels is boundary pushing, it’s listenable and it’s Boucher’s most ambitious and most consistent work to date.

Boucher’s pleasingly scattergun approach means that it doesn’t hold together as a fully coherent album. Yet after a couple of plays, the weird and wonderful world of Grimes soon starts to seep into you, and soon you won’t be able to imagine an ‘albums of the year’ article without this being on it--no matter what the sleeve looks like.

By embracing the pop orthodoxy, you might argue that Boucher has sacrificed some of what made her seem so alien when 4AD debut 'Visions' emerged from the ether back in 2012, but rest assured: she's still laughing and not being normal, only this time, it's all the way to the bank.

Art Angels has a sharper, sleeker sound that sneakily suggests she made the leap to working with big-name producers--when in fact, as always, she did everything herself. And impressively.

When it all clicks, it's a perfect pop moment. The worst that can be said of Art Angels is that its maximalist ambitions sometimes overshoot the needs of pop.

On Art Angels, we hear that high art experimentation fall into mainstream territory with only fleeting moments of brilliance.