On her side of Darkbloom, a split 12" with fellow Montrealer d'Eon, Claire Boucher of Grimes sounds like a pop star from a distant planet-- distant enough that "pop star" is an unfamiliar concept there, but close enough to intercept earthly radio signals and press some bootlegs of Mariah Carey's no. 1s. Boucher's music draws upon a diverse collection of influences (Panda Bear, Salem, Alicia Keys) as she experiments with eerie loops and a stratospheric falsetto. (She says that while recording last year's otherworldly Halfaxa, she "practiced" singing in four octaves by listening to Mariah's "Heartbreaker".) While Grimes' previous work found her burying her poppier inclinations beneath dense atmospherics and moody textures, her material on Darkbloom melds all of her impulses into a coherent and confident sound, resulting into some of her strongest tracks to date.
For Grimes, Darkbloom comes on the heels of a prolific 2010. She released two solid LPs: the melodic and intimate debut Geidi Primes, and the darker, more unified Halfaxa. The latter could be classified as bubblegum macabre; songs like "Weregild" and "Sagrad Прекрасный" somehow suggested the skeletons from Daft Punk's "Around the World" video singing Tiffany songs on karaoke night. I liked Geidi Primes even better, a record that filtered the confessional intimacy of lo-fi bedroom pop (as on the standout track "Rosa") through influences including dubstep to synth pop. Boucher's tendency to throw everything in the pot occasionally came off as a lack of unity, but I found its aesthetic miscellany to be one of her debut's charms. "Everybody thinks I'm boring," she sang in a mock-confessional tone on "Zoal, Face Dancer"-- a sentiment that nobody who heard the record could possibly agree with.
Darkbloom, though, announces Grimes' arrival as an avant-pop force. This is largely thanks to the single best song she's ever done, "Vanessa", which channels Lykke Li by way of a blissed-out Donna Summer reverie. "Crystal Ball", perhaps her most upbeat song yet, is also a stunner. Both tracks display a new, cleaner aesthetic for Grimes-- lushness instead of grain, beats that thump rather than pulse, vocals high and clear in the mix. Still, something else entirely makes Grimes unique. There's an eerie, supernatural undercurrent to these songs, and the moody instrumental pieces that surround them.
Chris d'Eon's side of the split, which follows last year's LP Palinopsia, isn't without highlights. His best track is the wistful, R&B-tinged "Transparency", a song about the uneventful sex lives of ghosts. Inspired by his longtime interest in Tibetan music, d'Eon figures himself in the Eastern symbol of the hungry ghost, a specter who's back from the beyond just to see his lover's face. Incidentally, not as great as it sounds: "Do you want be human? Do you want to make love again? I guess that's just the price you're gonna have to pay for transparency." Over the chorus' icy, arpeggiated synths, he comes to the logical conclusion: "Doing this was a big mistake."
In spite of d'Eon's weaker material (like the skittish and schmaltzy "Thousand Mile Trench") his tracks might have made a decent EP, but either way the two sides of Darkbloom don't work particularly well together. Following Grimes' tracks, which favor mood over story and transcend any particular emphasis on lyrics, d'Eon's half feels overly literal and tethered to the material world: His hungry ghost is left searching for a body to inhabit, while Grimes sounds altogether liberated from hers. Undoubtedly, Boucher hits the highest notes on Darkbloom, proving over the course of just five tracks that she's blossoming into a promising artist-- and one who's developing almost more quickly than we can keep track of. "I've moved far beyond that," she's already remarked of this material in a recent interview with Dummy. "I'm working on a full-length, which I kind of feel is my first album." And as the only complaint I've got with her side of Darkbloom is that it's too short, this is indeed cause for excitement.
