Grant delivers another winningly funny and mordant state of the world (and his heart) address on his excellent third album
John Grant bookends his third album with a verse from Corinthians about the idealised state and nature of love. It's more wishful thinking from the Colorado man; love or, indeed, life is very often not like that. Grant has a genius for saying the unsayable and it's not hard to see why he's become a cult hero in Ireland - his barbed couplets and stark honesty have been taken to heart by a country where an averted gaze and under-rug swept approach is often the response to uncomfortable reality.
Over his career, first with unsung band The Czars, his breakthrough success in 2010 with his wonderful debut solo album, Queen of Denmark, and 2013’s dance floor made for one, Pale Green Ghosts, Grant has become a bit like the Doug Stanhope of alternative music.
Indeed, several of the killer couplets on Grey Tickles, Black Pressure might find space in a Stanhope routine; on the title track Grant croons, “there are children who have cancer so all bets off because I can’t compete with that” later he observes that he’d “rather lose my arm inside a corn thresher “ than re-visit a lost romance and on the slyly Beatlesque title track, the HIV diagnosed singer laments that he was not around in the New York of the seventies as “I'd could have gotten a head start in the world of disease."
As for that album title - the first part is taken from the literal Icelandic translation for mid-life crisis and the second part is the direct Turkish translation for nightmare. Stop it, John! You’re killing us!
Mordantly hilarious he is but unlike lesser singer songwriters who try to practise open heart surgery with a rusty spanner, Grant is never portentous. Musically, Grey Tickles . . . genre jumps from the warm singer songwriter confessionals of his debut to the electro squelch and throb of his second album. On Voodoo Doll, he smirkingly essays elasticated lover-man funk a lot more successfully than Beck did on his misfiring Prince homage, 1999’s Midnite Vultures.
On the arch and unnerving Snug Slacks, the computer funk of Devo and the pervy appeal of Sparks unite as Grant sounds like an autodidact German psychotherapist with an amused disinterest in his clients. In a nice hipster smack down, he confuses Joan Baez with Joan As Policewoman, leading to a cute verse which name checks Angie Dickinson and Charlene Tilton, she of minor Dallas fame.
You & Him gets right to it and artfully breaks the Godwin Rule as Grant compares one particular unfortunate to Hitler, while on the jagged guitars meets seventies cop show theme tune of Guess How I Know, he hilariously rumbles the inadequacies of another transgressor by suggesting “You laughed all the way through Ordinary People”, a reference to Robert Redford's shrill and worthy 1980 Oscar winner.
However, all the mordant pithiness is jettisoned on Down Here, which harks back to the pure power of Queen of Denmark for melodic beauty and soul-baring. Magma Arrives could be a companion piece to Glacier, the stand-out from Pale Green Ghosts and the fantastic Disappointing (which features Tracey Thorn on vocals) manages to sound like Harold Faltermeyer meets Bowie circa Young Americans.
This is musically adventurous, emotionally raw and just great good fun. Once again, Grant’s songs are funny because they’re true.
Alan Corr
John Grant plays two sold-out shows in Dublin’s Vicar Street on November 9 and 10. He also plays Mandela Hall, Belfast on January 27; Cork Opera House on January 28 and Seapoint, Galway on January 30.
