- You really must approach any release from John Grant with your eyes wide open as much as your ears. It doesn’t do to presuppose what he’s going to provide you with based on previous aural essays. His fourth album Love Is Magic has as many prickly points as the previous trio of melancholic piano based sorrowful tunes, this time collaborating with electronic creative Benge (aka Ben Edwards of Wrangler) and then… something else.
The melancholy is still there – the title track examines his own lived experience of depression and loss – though he’s playing around with the sounds of another era, the later '70s and early '80s, and the advancement of electronic keyboard music. Some will hear the quirkiness of his countrymen Devo, others the experimentation of Gary Numan’s first foray into the charts as Tubeway Army, there’s even the chameleon Kate Bush (not to mention onetime Eurovision Song Contest entrants Telex). Grant has prefaced interviews promoting this album on two themes – quote the arseholes appear to be winning unquote (he’s got songs about Chelsea Manning and Donald Trump in this collection) and, “I think people should talk about the specific things they are dealing with. We’re constantly trying to figure out how to express things without actually expressing them. It’s absurd.”
Another inescapable aspect of this album is Grant has recently turned fifty and it’s long been a marker point for creative artists to either explore new territory or do some sort of retrospective analysis. Grant has been doing the analysis part for several years now, so that’s the expected bit (check out the track Is He Strange and the album’s closer Touch & Go) – what does surprise is just how free Grant sounds in pulling these sounds and styles into a listenable collection, despite the possible maudlin subject matter. There are some extraordinary lyrics, probably the more confronting hit you first up in the album opener Metamorphosis – “baby in the whitest house playing with his toys” and “hot Brazilian boys” and “fourteen-year-old boy rapes eighty-year-old man” – Grant suggests in an interview that he sees this as a newspaper headline which intrudes into your humdrum world. As he adds, “…half the battle is opening your eyes to notice things around you.”
And so, that’s the best sentence to describe Love Is Magic – open your eyes and notice what is happening around you. The song about Trump was originally to be about Vladimir Putin but broadened to cover the ultimate narcissist, and anyone else like him, over a lush electronic, tuneful field (and with a title that would need to be bleeped for general radio airplay). Grant has also put some heavy toe-tapping beats in Preppy Boy, He’s Got His Mother’s Hips and the snarkily bittersweet Diet Gum (which is lyrically like Carole Bayer Sager’s You’re Moving Out Today).
Grant has fashioned his career out of his painful sensitivity and being vulnerable is not the easiest path for a fragile, creative type to travel. Love Is Magic is both absurd and beautiful, and what an appropriate soundtrack for the latter years of the second decade of the twenty-first century.
- Blair Martin.