Grant Student

Wierd. I kept thinking of Pulp when writing this review. I quite like them, and al, but I generally don't think about them from one month to the next, yet here they are. And here you are. Happy days.

RIP Videosyncratic.

GRANT - SKIRR (Big Red Sky)

“Yeah, it’s a great start, boys; so, when’s the real singer going to finish it off?”

A smidgen harsh, we’ll admit, but Skirr is an LP that has clearly had lots of thought and expertise poured into its creation, but which falls down for us whenever the vocals start. It’s a praiseworthily varied record, impossible to sum up in a pithy description, but sophisticated electro goth would be the closest we could get to swiping at the truth in a snappy soundbite, and we really, really want to like it more than we do. But we don’t, and sometimes you just have to admit these things straight.

The opener “Null” is brief burst of Future Sound Of London garnished with a snatch from “Never Can Say Goodbye” for no obvious reason, but thereafter “Exeat” sets the tone for the record, with chubby 80s bass and a portentous vocal line occasionally exploding into hissing guitars, leaving a slight aftertaste of Psychedelic Furs. Elsewhere “Isthmus” (blimey, Grant, is this a tracklist or a championship game of Scrabble?) is a darkhearted ballad dusted with synth oboe, loosely recalling Depeche Mode’s Violator, whilst “Acres To Hectares” is an improbable industro-rock rave up from 1990 with a caffeinated baggy beat and some wobbly keyboard squiggles suspended between the first flushes of techno and Radiohead’s Amnesiac, all underpinning a tune that surreally threatens to morph into “It Was A Very Good Year”. This is nothing if not eclectic and adventurous recording!

For the most part the music is highly intriguing, if perhaps evidence of too many dips into the Pick ‘N’ Mix counter of recent rock history, and there are only a couple of truly duff tracks: “Below The Seal” welds outdated guitars onto an Isaac Hayes conga rhythm, something in the manner of a blaxploitation theme as envisioned by the Sounds staff in 1988 – horrible, in other words – and “Shellac Skin” is a heavy, doomy trudge over a finger-in-ear folk club vocal melody about addiction that ought to be blackly imposing, but just sounds silly.

Aside from these two mis-steps, his is a collection of ear-catching oddments crying out for a great voice to bind them together, and if Scott Walker were to add his creamy voice to this grab bag of neat ideas and production tricks it might really work; if Bryan Ferry were to drape a few louche vocal takes over the top it might be pretty fascinating; hell, even if someone who can’t really sing but who has a grasp of storytelling and drama, such as Jarvis Cocker, were to hove into view we’d love this LP. But, sadly, Grant isn’t any of these – in fact, he sounds much more like Russell Senior’s wayward vocal attempts on Pulp’s misfired second album, Freaks.

Let’s cut some slack, Grant doesn’t have a bad voice at all – you could imagine him fronting some grown up indie band, on Pink Hedgehog Records or somesuch - but he doesn’t have the gravitas or depth to his singing to pull off this rich confection. The closing track, “Scent & Snow” a simple piece of pop euphoria that sounds like the work of a band locked up for 5 hours with their management shouting “Write a hit!” through the keyhole, perhaps encapsulates the paradox of Skirr: it’s not a particularly good song, although it is bouncy enough, but Grant’s vocals work so much better in this unfettered environment. Just when we’re having fun, the record ends with over ten minutes of a single slowly oscillating keyboard tone, infuriating and fascinating in equal measure. Come to think of it, Pulp did this too, at the end of This Is Hardcore. But they’d learnt not to let Russell sing by that time, of course.