On the percolating title track that opens John Grant's second solo album, he sings of "pale green ghosts"-- trees that line the Colorado byways by which he oriented himself, "Helping me to know my place." The line packs a double meaning, as the entire album is Grant mapping exactly where he's at after the fiery dissolution of a relationship with a man who a mere album ago was the one. Grant's route is not complicated-- really just a rough ride to downtown Fuck You and back, his hatred for his ex occasionally outpaced by his own self-loathing.
In his previous life, Grant helmed the Czars, giving Denver bragging rights to a decent band in the late 1990s. After the band fell apart, Grant cleaned up and came out, and collaborated with Midlake for his 2010 solo debut Queen of Denmark. In the intervening years Grant contracted HIV and went public about his status on stage during a performance with Hercules and Love Affair last summer. Pale Green Ghost's themes and energy dovetail out of all of this-- it's an intense, angry record of inconsolable heartbreak, crooned with authority over luscious electro. Though not strictly for the disco, perhaps for the post-disco comedown and hungover dejection, producer Birgir Þórarinsson (of Iceland's GusGus) bouys the record and keeps it from capsizing under the weight of its own emotional baggage.
Pale Green Ghosts is defined by Grant's willingness to broadcast directly from his hell; he's a bit of a serial confessor, and the confessions are marked by blitheness that belies just how much he did care, how far from love he has fallen. He sings the songs of a man with little else to lose. There is not much the way of self-preservation, which can be a touch brutal, as when he addresses his diagnosis on "Ernest Borgnine": "Doc ain't lookin’ at me, says I got the disease/ Now what did you expect, you spent your life on your knees." At times his anguish is refined: "There are days when I think about you/ And on those days I really feel like a fool, because/ You don’t deserve to have somebody think about you," as he sings on "You Don't Have To". Other times the lyrics are visceral, like day-after break-up texts, clamoring to inflict the hurt right back "You don’t have to say things that you don’t mean/ It just embarrasses me/ because you think you’re so fucking cool."
Grant's regal baritone makes his sadness and his anger sound that much more serious-- but throughout the album there's some delight mixed in with all the spite, a sadistic little smirk lodged in the flesh-ripping sarcasm. On "GMF", he flips between braggadocio ("But I am the greatest motherfucker that you’re ever going to meet") and backhands ("You think I hate myself but it’s you I hate"). "Remember how we used to fuck all night long?" he asks on "You Don't Have To", only to answer, "Neither do I." It's eviscerating and almost funny, but maybe not ha-ha funny. On the chorus of "Vietnam" he extends the metaphor of just how his ex has laid his life to waste, but the real decimation comes with the outro: "And the only thing that brings me any comfort/ Is the knowledge that no matter who you’re with/ You’ll always be alone." Grant is plummeting to the depths, and exacting payback through incisive emotional terror as he goes down.
Grant's ease of disclosure can be unnerving, but it's this sense that nothing is (seemingly) too private for him to share in a song that makes Pale Green Ghosts so potent and, ultimately, accessible. If you have ever felt splayed by life, made powerless by circumstance, you can find yourself seething right along.
