10 Records of 2015: Grimes's Art Angels

There’s a scene that’s common to horror movies of the supernatural variety. A protagonist arrives at a strange location, perhaps lured by weird sounds or local rumours, or the readings from some scientific device. Venturing towards the source of the disturbance, through an abandoned building, forest or cavern, they suddenly arrive at a captivating scene. Perhaps there are glowing coloured lights or webs of pink ectoplasm. Perhaps there are arcs of books and candlesticks suspended in the air. Perhaps there’s a silent audience of a thousand woodland creatures, similarly captivated. And at the centre of all this, there’s a ghostly figure or figures — perhaps a woman or a group of children — in glowing pale attire.

The protagonist, along with the camera, watches the figures in their self-absorbed state. Perhaps they are weeping or singing or playing. Perhaps they are repeating some tender scene, over and over. Perhaps they are drifting, lost in thought, murmuring some half-forgotten phrase. The protagonist is mesmerised by the beauty and sadness of the scene, and cannot help but approach the figure. Suddenly, their head whips round and their eyes lock onto the camera — big and black and empty — lips stretching into a snarl, raised hands revealing claws. The idyllic vision curdles and collapses around the protagonist as they turn and run, the ghostly figure giving chase. It is then as if the whole landscape is trying to prevent their escape: books flying off shelves, gnarled roots grasping at ankles, clouds of bats billowing from possible exits. And the ghostly figure is suddenly everywhere, reappearing at every turn, constantly both behind and in front of the fleeing protagonist; the brambles are her fingers and the moon is her eye. And from that moment on, the ghost is no longer consigned to a gothic set piece, but can appear anywhere: under the bed, on the telephone, in the mirror of the school toilets, on a television screen, in dreams.

For me, this pivotal moment captures the shift between Grimes’s previous album Visions and Art Angels. As someone who writes a lot about voice, I can’t write about Claire Boucher’s music without focusing on her unique vocals, the way they are produced and positioned within the tracks. On Visions, the vocals dwelt within the extraordinary alien environments of the tracks without disturbing them. Wrapped in reverb and set far back behind the solid bass stalagmites and fleshy outgrowths of synth, we’d glimpse the ghostly Grimes skipping in circles with a sisterhood of dopplegangers, reclining by a moon lake, talking to trees or humming sweet hexes. The voices were indistinct and the melodies tripped in closed roundelays or meshed in airy canons. The spine-tingling terror of ‘Oblivion’, with its ‘See you on a dark night’ refrain, came from the feeling that the distant vocal was being overheard: a voice carried on the wind, bearing dark threats in its childlike chant.