FEATURE:
Vinyl Corner
John Grant - Pale Green Ghosts
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BECAUSE there is some…
John Grant news and future album action, I wanted to include his second solo album, Pale Green Ghosts, in Vinyl Corner. His album, Boy from Michigan, arrives on 25th June. He unveiled the title track on 24th March and, after one listen, it is clear that Grant is on peak form! I want to return to 2013 and the brilliant Pale Green Ghosts. One should buy the album on vinyl, as it is a wonderful thing:
“Pale Green Ghosts is the second solo album by former The Czars frontman John Grant, released on March 11, 2013 on the Bella Union label. Pale Green Ghosts was recorded in Reykjavík, Iceland with Icelandic electronic musician Birgir Þórarinsson (a.k.a. Biggi Veira) of electro-pop group Gus Gus, and also features a range of local musicians on the album as well as Sinéad O'Connor singing backing vocals.
The title refers to the Russian olive trees that stand along the I-25 highway near Grant's family home in the small town of Parker, Colorado”.
I am going to bring in a couple of positive reviews for Pale Green Ghosts in a minute. First, I want to bring in some snippets from an interview from The Guardian. We learn about Grant’s HIV diagnosis, life after The Czars, and what it was like recording his new album:
“As soon as he landed in Sweden, Grant had to find a doctor. A week later the test results confirmed his fears: he was HIV positive.
"I was in shock," he says, falteringly, sitting on a couch in his west London hotel room, clutching a cushion to his chest. "It was a really, really dark time." With his strong brow and heavy beard, the burly 44-year-old has the face of a melancholy Viking.
The diagnosis comes up within the first 10 minutes of the interview, in response to a simple question about why making his new album, Pale Green Ghosts, took longer than expected. I would be taken aback by Grant's candour had I not already seen him break the news on stage last summer, to the immense surprise and confusion of the audience, while performing at London's Meltdown festival with New York disco act Hercules and Love Affair.
Even though he recorded the new album in his adopted Reykjavik, with Biggi Veira of electro-pop group GusGus, it's a record consumed by his past. "It's about putting a puzzle together," he says. "You're trying to figure stuff out." The title refers to the Russian olive trees that stand along the I-25 highway near his family home in the small town of Parker, Colorado. "They have these pale green leaves with a silvery back, so they're sort of luminescent in the moonlight," he says, enraptured. "And at the end of May every year, like clockwork, they grow these tiny little yellow flowers that exude the most beautiful fragrance I've ever smelled."
In 2004, after a decade of good reviews and poor sales, the rest of the Czars abandoned Grant, and he doesn't blame them. He joined AA, moved to New York and quit music to become a hospital interpreter. It was with great reluctance that he finally accepted an invitation to join the band Midlake in Denton, Texas to work on Queen of Denmark in 2009. It turned out to be a joyous and transformational creative experience, but other areas of his life were in chaos.
Only after his HIV diagnosis has Grant accepted that he hadn't conquered his addiction but simply transferred it from substances to sex. "If I can't go out and do fat rails [of cocaine] off the bathroom floor at a club, I want to at least have my sex, because sex is natural. Nobody's going to deny me that, right? But that's just cheating. I was out there fucking for a purpose, to hurt myself, to punish myself for not being good enough. And when I realised I had to deal with that too, I was just so tired. I was like, Are you kidding me? I can't relate in a normal way to anything! I mean, it's enough to make you despair."
There has been so much drama in Grant's life that one can't help but dwell on it, which makes him seem more serious and self-obsessed than he is. Give him the option and he will talk eloquently about gay rights, the Pussy Riot case or the confounding complexity of Icelandic grammar, which challenges even a polyglot "language freak" like Grant. But he keeps getting sucked back into mysteries even more unfathomable”.
I really love his fourth studio album, Love Is Magic, of 2018, though I feel his first couple of solo albums are his best. Queen of Denmark is his phenomenal debut. I think Pale Green Ghosts is a worthy and very solid follow-up.
Pale Green Ghosts accrued some love and positivity from critics. I will quote from a deep review in a second but, now, a briefer one from NME:
“Three songs in, former Czars singer John Grant brands himself “the greatest motherfucker”. You can kinda see what he’s getting at because, for his second album, he’s all but ditched the ’70s soft-rock sound of debut ‘Queen Of Denmark’ in favour of dark ’80s electro. The risk pays off. Grant’s rich voice dovetails beautifully with the silvery synths of ‘GMF’ and ‘Vietnam’, and he gets away with channelling The Human League on ‘Black Belt’. His lyrics are brave, too – see ‘Ernest Borgnine’, where he wryly references his HIV-positive status. He said it best himself: this is audacious stuff from one talented motherfucker”.
In another review, Alex Pedtridis of The Guardian had a lot of kind things to say about one of the strongest albums of 2013:
“As anyone who's spent an evening nodding understandingly while a friend bangs on and on and on about their ex will attest, there are more enjoyable and rewarding ways to spend your time. It says something about Grant's confounding brilliance as a songwriter that it's hard to imagine a more enjoyable and rewarding hour of music being released this year than Pale Green Ghosts. Whether detailing the agonising death throes of a relationship – or rather, his relationship – on You Don't Have To, or enumerating his multiple personal failings on GMF, his lyrics are frequently astonishing, filled with vivid metaphors and perfect comic timing. Depression, he suggests at one point, is like "a cold, concrete room with fluorescent lighting", adding: "Which, as you know, makes everything look bad".
The album's closer, Glacier, offers what you might conceivably describe as seven minutes of inspirational messages for teenagers who find themselves in the position Grant was once himself in, growing up gay in a religious household. But that makes it sound awful, and Glacier is variously funny, wise, foul-mouthed with rage and impossibly moving. "This pain that's moving through you is like a glacier," he sings, "carving out deep valleys and creating spectacular landscapes, and nourishing the ground with precious metals and other stuff." There's something about that vague, dismissive "and other stuff" that both leavens the mood and makes the song's emotional punch even more winding.
A collaboration with Birgir Thórarinsson of Icelandic electronic experimentalists Gus Gus, it's undoubtedly a darker and harsher-sounding album than its predecessor. Some of the soft-rock lushness the Texas band Midlake brought to Queen of Denmark has been stripped away and replaced by sparse electronics and occasionally rather ominous-sounding string arrangements: the words of Ernest Borgnine address Grant's HIV diagnosis with a combination of black humour and stoical determination, but the music tells a slightly different story. It swims around his voice, dislocated and presageful; the opening synth riff sounds as if it's falling apart as it plays. But Grant's way with a melody never fails him, even when his lyrics are at their most dyspeptic. In fact, you sometimes get the sense that the more likely the song's words are to tie your stomach in knots, the more likely they are to come couched in a warm, gorgeously lulling tune. If our old chum TC thinks his depiction in It Doesn't Matter to Him errs on the unfair side, he can always console himself with the fact that he inadvertently inspired an exquisite piece of music. In fact, he's inadvertently inspired a genuinely remarkable album: self-obsessed but completely compelling, profoundly discomforting but beautiful, lost in its own fathomless personal misery, but warm, funny and wise. It shouldn't work, but it does”.
In preparation for new John Grant material, I have been revisiting some of his previous work. I think that Pale Green Ghosts is one of his very finest releases; an album that offers so much to the listener. One of the most original and popular voices in music, go and buy this album in vinyl if you can. Ahead of the release of Boy from Michigan, revisit the wonderful…
PALE Green Ghosts.