Arcade Fire’s Will Butler Reviews Grimes’ Art Angels

Arcade Fire‘s Will Butler has written about Grimes‘ Art Angels for the Talkhouse, the website where musicians talk about other music.

Butler grapples with how to approach the album: 

I appreciate and admire Art Angels. That sounds lame — no, it’s like how Orthodox Jews and devout Mormons get along. “I respect your devotion, and you probably understand me better than, say, anyone else on this F train — but I really, really don’t care that much about your Jesus. High fives on father Abraham, though.”

“In Art Angels, Grimes is coming, to a large extent, from the world of 2000s pop, but she creates a giant, esoteric, viable world teeming with all sorts of poisonous Jurassic life,” he writes. “My problem — my personal problem — is that I grew up prejudiced against 2000s pop, and that the atmosphere of the Jurassic period has the wrong ratio of elements for my organism. I’m more Cretaceous.” 

Butler is the biggest fan of “Scream”, which features Taiwanese rapper Aristophanes over Grimes’ production. “The language barrier is a filter through which only charisma can pass,” he writes. “Aristophanes is plenty charismatic. Grimes’ production is charismatic. The work is divine and human.”

He compares the album’s usage of filter sweeps to Eiffel 65′s “Blue”, which he notes was “the song that was everywhere in my teenage years, and I hated it. And I hate it still.” He talks about trying to enjoy the album in spite of his prejudices, which previously kept him from liking Bob Marley and Bob Dylan, and also compares her to Prince. 

“Grimes is a genuine world-builder,” he writes. “She might could make worlds big and convincing enough to change lots of people’s perception of the actual world. It feels cold to stand outside her creation and judge it. It’s like watching the Big Bang from a different dimension — the heat and the particles flying, all future life boiling into itself, the globe of reality expanding.”

Read the full review here.

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