Album review: Grimes - Miss Anthropocene
[rating]5[/rating]
Claire Boucher — aka Grimes — has become gossip blog fodder by dint of her relationship with Tesla founder Elon Musk, with whom she is having a child.
She has also spent the past several years trying to avoid being dragged into a feud with rapper Azealia Banks who, before taking on the entire population of Ireland in 2019, posted a serious of wildly suggestive Instagram invectives against Boucher and Musk.
All of which potentially bodes ill for the much-anticipated new Grimes long player, her first as a full-fledged celebrity. Would tawdry mainstream fame rob her songwriting of its lustre?
It has happened before to other artists, and it feels telling that four years have elapsed since Boucher’s previous record.
Such fears prove completely groundless. Miss Anthropocene is often bonkers, yes. But it is beautiful too — and by turns breathless, scary and irresistible.
Boucher comes charging out with six-minute opener ‘So Heavy I Fell Though the Earth’, which sounds like Enya and the Cocteau Twins trying to be heard above a rave in an nearby tent.
This is an LP that contains multitudes. Grimes goes scary cyberpunk on the clattering ‘Darksei’d, as over-the-top and baroque as you would expect of a song named after a comic book villain.
The Canadian meanwhile pulls off a surprisingly passable Taylor Swift impersonation on the semi-acoustic ‘Delete Forever’, her voice doing earnest battle with a strumming guitar. And she delivers an impassioned torch song closer ‘IDORU’, an epic that pairs her expressive coo with cascades of melody.
Grimes continues to be a singular presence on Instagram, where she recently posted an image of a baby with angel wings and a video titled ‘Grimes Pregnancy Skincare and Psychedelic Make-Up Routine’.
It’s pretty out there. by contrast is nothing more or less than the year’s first great pop album.
