John Grant's new release: Boy From Michigan

If ever there was a risk that success might dilute John Grant’s voice, recent history has put paid to it. Faced with America’s nightmare, Grant - Czars’ baritone frontman turned crossover critical darling - felt compelled to reflect on the American Dream from his outsider's perspective.

Dreamily produced by experimental Welsh artist Cate Le Bon, the result is an expansive and frequently exquisite summation of Grant’s storytelling powers. Just as he has form in mixing soft-rock settings with raw yearnings in sensory melds of excavation and evocation, memory and melody, so Boy From Michigan develops as a multi-layered and resonant coming-of-age story-in-songs: if its details are hazy, Grant's ability to conjure deep feelings couldn’t be keener.

Across three novelistic sub-sections - childhood, teenage, adulthood - the result views innocence through the lens of life experience in sound and song. The title track references candy and cemeteries against submerged saxophones and Vangelis-like synths, balancing 80s airs with retrospective warnings: "They’ll eat you alive..." Between its cars, hot nights and slow-motion soft-rock settings, County Fair resembles an etiolated Brian Wilson and contains hints of youthful sorrow, which darken for the moody The Rusty Bull.

Teenage tales of sexual experiences sow seeds of self-laceration. The Cruise Room and Mike And Julie emerge from clarinet clouds like long-suppressed memories, hazy and haunting. Grant downplays his wit to let the songs breathe initially, though later zingers are keenly judged. For the sweet after-life missive of Just So You Know, he savages the “trogs’’ who wouldn’t understand his sentiment with a droll flippancy, careful not to swamp the song's delicacy. 

For the album’s last third, a damaged but sharp-eyed adult persona emerges. The Devo-ish Rhetorical Figure is sketchy but playful, while two political critiques justify Grant’s seeming allergy to understatement. Your Portfolio envisages the US economy as a cock, a metaphor milked exhaustively. Over nine minutes, The Only Baby’s Donald Trump takedown makes 2018’s Smug Cunt sound affectionate.

By this point, it would be daft to expect a glibly cathartic closer. Instead, Grant couches a critique of toxic masculinity in swooning balladry on Billy, melody and message merged. Grant and his birth country's pains linger, but these songs cut to their quick with character and feeling, wit and precision.

From Reccord Collector