After putting the finishing touches to his long–awaited fourth solo LP, John Grant has a run of UK and European live dates throughout October and November, including his first ever Brixton Academy performance in London. Ahead of this Grant performed at this year’s Green Man and Edinburgh festivals in August.
Its been a busy two and a half years for Grant since the release of 2015’s all–conquering Grey Tickles, Black Pressure. Last year saw him program his first ever music festival with the North Atlantic Flux in Hull, followed by a much celebrated appearance alongside Jarvis Cocker, Richard Hawley and Susanne Sundfor at the Royal Albert Hall performing the songs of Scott Walker. More recently he released the critically acclaimed album Mr Dynamiteas part of Creep Show, a new collaborative project involving himself and the band.
With his fourth solo album, “Love Is Magic”, Grant has continued evolving, creating his most electronic record yet.
In collaboration with Benge (Ben Edwards), analogue synth expert / collector and a member of electronic trio Wrangler, Grant’s collaborators earlier this year under the collective name of Creep Show on the album Mr Dynamite. Anyone familiar with John Grant’s story will recognise his battles – with addiction and health, with trusting love and relationships. From this turbulence he’s forged another riveting collection of often brutal diatribes and confessionals, where humour, fear, anxiety and anger overlap as Grant, with trademark candour, figuratively exposes the machinations of his saturated brain. It’s epitomised by the album’s brilliant opener Metamorphosis, almost as if his warring psyches are facing up to one another, as impervious synth-pop and brain-on-fire imagery (“Tiki bar, rat soufflé, Buik regal, Marvin Gaye”) melts into dream-ballad introspection (“Questions left unanswered, spiritual extortion”) and back to synth-backed mania. The magic of love pervades in two gorgeous, magisterial ballads toward the end of the album,Is He Strange and The Common Snipe – referring to the wader bird that makes a unique ‘bleating’ sound by rubbing its tailfeathers together.
The Fat Angel Sings 