2 LP
With his fourth solo album, Love Is Magic, Grant has continued evolving, creating his most electronic record yet.
In collaboration with Benge (Ben Edwards), analogue synth expert / collector and a member of electronic trio Wrangler, Grant’s collaborators earlier this year under the collective name of Creep Show on the album Mr Dynamite. Anyone familiar with Grant’s story will recognise his battles - with addiction and health, with trusting love and relationships. From this turbulence he’s forged another riveting collection of often brutal diatribes and confessionals, where humour, fear, anxiety and anger overlap as Grant, with trademark candour, figuratively exposes the machinations of his saturated brain. It’s epitomised by the album’s brilliant opener Metamorphosis, almost as if his warring psyches are facing up to one another, as impervious synth-pop and brain-on-fire imagery (“Tiki bar, rat soufflé, Buik regal, Marvin Gaye”) melts into dream-ballad introspection (“Questions left unanswered, spiritual extortion”) and back to synth-backed mania. The magic of love pervades in two gorgeous, magisterial ballads toward the end of the album, Is He Strange and The Common Snipe - referring to the wader bird that makes a unique ‘bleating’ sound by rubbing its tailfeathers together.
A1 Metamorphosis
A2 Love Is Magic
B1 Tempest
B2 Preppy Boy
C1 Smug Cunt
C2 He''s Got His Mother''s Hips
C3 Diet Gum
D1 Is He Strange
D2 The Common Snipe
D3 Touch & Go