Grimes
Of all the music that’s come out of Montreal music scene in the last while—and the list includes some truly stunning work by the likes of Young Galaxy, Colin Stetson, Dirty Beaches, Braids and Land of Talk to name but a few—one work has pleased and perplexed me continuously and continually. The record in question is Grimes' Halfaxa.
I’ll out myself right now: I included Halfaxa on my ballot for the Polaris Music Prize.
Perhaps more impressive than Halfaxa is Grimes herself; Claire Boucher is a thoughtful interview, an artist who seems perfectly aware of what she thinks, feels, wants and hopes.
Case in point: In responding to my suggestion that a lot of the material on Halfaxa is both sexual and sensual, Boucher doesn’t duck. “I use Grimes to feel powerful,” she says. “I suppose sexuality is a part of that.
“I like lots of heavy bass and heavy drums, things like this, because it's so physical in a way I can never be. I'm pretty small, nervous, not very strong, not super outgoing. But it's fun to do something so self-indulgent, where you can sound big and imposing, and no one really knows that's not the case.
Big and imposing is one thing, weird is another. Halfaxa is being slotted into the conversation as weird-pop. I don’t necessarily disagree, but, to an extent, weird-pop is basically a filing cabinet for a lot of music that isn’t all that weird to its makers.
“There's a lot of music that's a lot weirder than Grimes,” says Boucher, “so I think it's not that it's weird, but that it's weird ‘pop' specifically. Pop music is generally associated with being vapid or simple—which I don't think it necessarily is—so when it isn't that, I think it becomes weird pop in some people's eyes.
“I often pull from genres that are more typically considered to be weird by definition. I don't consider my music weird pop really. My music doesn't sound weird to me, I actually always feel like it's relatively normal or even boring until I release it and people say it's weird.”
Beauty, or, in this case, quality, isn’t necessarily in the eye of the beholder; art goes out into the world and does what it’s going to do, regardless of what its creator intended.
That said, Grimes knows what she thinks she wants to achieve with her ethereal, powerful and sexy doom-and-gloomscapes.
“I think one way [to approach my music] is to appreciate it as very modern and something that is really the product of a generation that grew up with the Internet and all the ADD qualities that result from that.
“The best thing I would hope someone would get out of my music though is what I get out of music, which is either some kind of escapist comfort or melancholic anxiety.”
Grimes
Halfaxa
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