- It’s really gratifying to hear how the world has taken to the -let’s be honest- alarming sounds of Grace Stevenson. Two years on from the lo-fi industrial-dance hell of her debut EP, Mother Of Millions and there’s a real sense of anticipation for her first album, Hired Muscle. It’s an enthusiasm for her brutal brand of music that I just couldn’t have imagined when she first kicked all this off.
She’s changed with the times too, of course. The thunder of Hired Muscle can be heard in far greater clarity than Mother. That’s true of the whole production job, but also, notably, the vocals, which no longer appear to have been fed through a guitar distortion pedal. Died in the wool industrial and techno fans may be in a fizz at this point - is this the studio perfect Grace Stevenson sound we never wanted!? The supposed ‘breakthrough’ record can go either way for weirdo leftfielders, producing the bizarre beauty of Grimes’ experimental pop or the sterile, cookie-cutter dance of Kedr Livanskiy on her last effort.
Fortunately Grace Stevenson has a little experience in the pop side of things, as part of the much-liked 100%. In that regard, though they released a single in April this year, 100% have officially hung up their synthesisers and put their electro-pop on hiatus. It’s interesting, listening to that final tune, New All, I could easily imagine it kicking about with the rest of Hired Muscle: there’s more than a little sugar syrup mixing it up with the sweat and steel now for Rebel Yell.
It definitely doesn’t sound horrible, but does it sound a lot like 100%? Bits of it, sure. A cut like Let Go, might have a bass that’s like grinding rocks together, but otherwise it’s pure electro-pop: more than a little 100%, maybe even a little Madonna. That isn’t how most of this sounds though, not by a long shot. Guest spots like the Gussy collab Stains takes his Perfume Genius sounding voice and thrusts it into a production dust-storm; it ends up sounding like the unhinged impressions of pop music made by Gonjasufi or Young Fathers. Elsewhere Stevenson is playing to her established Rebel Yell strengths, with pulverising mid-tempo electro-techno that should fill the dancefloor, like Next Exit or the collage of industrial noises that thunder out of High Authority.
More often than not, however, flitting between industrial and dance beats -those clinical or just plain savage timbres- and then matching them with the much cleaner vocals of Hired Muscle results in tunes like Power City or Pressure Drop, which are the sort of thing we haven’t really heard since the heyday of electroclash, back at the turn of the millenium. I remember those days producing fairly boring beats and, to be honest, I don’t have very fond memories of Miss Kittin And The Hacker and the rest of that sound, but maybe I’ve changed, because Rebel Yell, I could listen to her all night. Maybe she just does it better? Taking dance moves, metal brutality and honeyed sweetness and actually doing all three justice.
Hired Muscle says all the right things about Rebel Yell. It’s a significant progression from her last release and one that both embraces her legacy while building many exciting new things on that foundation. Unlikely as it seems, it appears to be lighting a bonfire of hype too. That means for once what a bunch of the listening public want out of music and what I want, actually seem to match up. That’s plain scary to me, but hey, like Rebel Yell, I guess it’s just the right sort of scary.
- Chris Cobcroft.