A few things combined to cause me to buy Visions:
1. I was in Polyester looking for some road trip music for that day.
2. The store was playing the record at what turned out to be two of its poppiest (and best) tracks, "Circumambient" (a punchy, vivid, electro-pop anthem) and "Vowels = Space And Time" (Robyn + School of Seven Bells + a hint of U2 = excellent), while I was in there.
3. It sounded great loud.
So I was expecting its pleasures to be immediate, and some of them are, but mostly it was a bit underwhelming at first, and actually it's taken quite a few listens for the record to begin to really reveal itself to me, becoming better and better the more I listen to it.
It's kind of electro-pop, I guess; it reminds me a bit of Janelle Monae's excellent The ArchAndroid, not so much musically (Claire Boucher, the artist behind Grimes, has a versatile voice but not Monae's high-wire virtuosity, often preferring to chop up and mix her vocals into a song so that they're more akin to another layer of instrumentation/tone than to a true lead line) as in terms of its approach and overall vibe, particularly the very constructed/'produced' feel that it has.
Anyway, like I was saying, it's definitely a grower; its little hooks (just as often an earworm of a beat or unexpected synth line as a quirky vocal run or blissful-sounding concoction of reverb-y upper register trills) have a tendency to gradually become more distinct and then lodge firmly in the head. The brightest moments are high-energy, heading towards dance music; the quieter moments (the 6-minute Four Tet-y "Skin" is a particular highlight) are just as good...with the benefit of a couple of weeks of living with Visions, and working my way inside its world, I'm starting to really like it. This one might turn out to be a keeper.
1. I was in Polyester looking for some road trip music for that day.
2. The store was playing the record at what turned out to be two of its poppiest (and best) tracks, "Circumambient" (a punchy, vivid, electro-pop anthem) and "Vowels = Space And Time" (Robyn + School of Seven Bells + a hint of U2 = excellent), while I was in there.
3. It sounded great loud.
So I was expecting its pleasures to be immediate, and some of them are, but mostly it was a bit underwhelming at first, and actually it's taken quite a few listens for the record to begin to really reveal itself to me, becoming better and better the more I listen to it.
It's kind of electro-pop, I guess; it reminds me a bit of Janelle Monae's excellent The ArchAndroid, not so much musically (Claire Boucher, the artist behind Grimes, has a versatile voice but not Monae's high-wire virtuosity, often preferring to chop up and mix her vocals into a song so that they're more akin to another layer of instrumentation/tone than to a true lead line) as in terms of its approach and overall vibe, particularly the very constructed/'produced' feel that it has.
Anyway, like I was saying, it's definitely a grower; its little hooks (just as often an earworm of a beat or unexpected synth line as a quirky vocal run or blissful-sounding concoction of reverb-y upper register trills) have a tendency to gradually become more distinct and then lodge firmly in the head. The brightest moments are high-energy, heading towards dance music; the quieter moments (the 6-minute Four Tet-y "Skin" is a particular highlight) are just as good...with the benefit of a couple of weeks of living with Visions, and working my way inside its world, I'm starting to really like it. This one might turn out to be a keeper.
