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The Boy from Michigan and Icelandic citizen, singer songwriter John Grant, is on tour with his sixth studio album The Art of the Lie. I caught up with the tour at Glasgow’s Barrowland Ballroom.
A trip to Glasgow is always an adventure for an Edinburger like me (or a “C**t From Edinburgh”, as local comedian Kevin Bridges prefers to call the citizens of the capital, affectionately using the Scottish gender neutral slur.) Glasgow is of course way cooler than stuffy Edinburgh and Barrowland if not the coolest, is by far the best venue in town. As John Grant exclaimed in the middle of his set “This is the best fucking venue in the whole world!”
I have been a John Grant fan since his debut solo album Queen of Denmark, was hailed an instant classic by Mojo magazine and voted best album of 2010. He continued this success in 2013 with Pale Green Ghosts which was awarded best album of the year by Rough Trade. Then came Grey Tickles, Black Pressure (2015), Love is Magic (2018) and The Boy From Michigan (2021) He also released a live album, John Grant and the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra: Live in Concert in 2014.
Grant’s portfolio of chamber pop music is a comforting aural blanket of beautifully crafted, luxuriously arranged, torch songs and witty up tempo numbers. Over the years he has been drifting away from the folk and country influences of his early bands The Czars and Midlake into the realm of electronic pop.
The Art of the Lie is arguably his most personal and experimental work , and the closest to a concept album that he has made.
The subject matter is a continuation of the themes from his previous recordings – growing up gay in a conservative Christian mid west family and the emotional abuse of mendacious fundamental religion and the right wing politics of his homeland. We have heard this before but it won’t go away.
New to the album are several exciting funky bass tracks but on first hearing, the basic repetitive phrases and ambient soundscape of some of the slow numbers left me cold, and too often his warm baritone voice was unnecessarily distorted by a vocoder.
But thankfully on stage, he concentrated on upbeat songs and interspersed the new ones with old favourites, some of which were given a funky makeover. Pale Green Ghosts in particular took on a new life.
The set began with the groovy All That School for Nothing and continued with new electronic interpretations of Black Belt, Marz, It Doesn’t Matter to Him. I felt that he was warming up his voice for the first few songs because it wasn’t until he moved over to the piano to sing Zeitgeist, Daddy and Glacier that his vocals soared, hitting every note with perfect pitch. If the audience weren’t already standing he would have had three standing ovations.
His Latin version of You Don’t Have To almost missed the mark with its difficult metronome syncopations but his retro bossa nova/rumba piano interludes saved it from disaster.
He was back on form with The Boy from Michigan and Rusty Bull but took another emotional dip with the poignant recollections of Father. However this was immediately remedied by a blast of another new funky song, Meek AF, an angry diatribe against the Christian Right.
Following on, I didn’t warm to the scary Halloween vibes of The Child Catcher, but once again he lifted our spirits by ending the set with a wildly enjoyable Chicken Bones.
I was disappointed that he did not include, which is for me the new album’s best track, Marbles. A classic JG love song, its continuous soft Burundi drum beat and familiar Grant chant, leads us in to an elegant synthesized Burt Bacharach style melody which flies to its chorus twice before being unexpectedly hijacked by a break of free form psychedelic electric guitar. It’s novel to hear these contrasting musical memories combined in this way. I wish more of the album was like this.
Meanwhile I am waiting for Grant to cheer up and let some of that Glasgow humour, which he loves, rub off on him. Time to finally burst out of this depressing confessional cocoon and take flight with more positive love songs and more of the uplifting electronic dance music he treated us to at Barrowland.
The Art of the Lie tour continues in the UK and throughout Northern Europe with dates into November 2024 and travels to Australia in March 2025. There are no US dates confirmed as yet.
The Art of the Lie was released via Bella Union on June 14th 2024 and produced by Ivor Guest. It peaked at number 5 in the Scottish Albums chart and number 2 in the UK Independent Albums chart
Robert Malcolm is an Interior Designer who relocated from London to his home town of Edinburgh in 2019. Under the pen name of Bobby Burns he had his first novel, a gay erotic thriller called Bone Island published by Homofactus Press in 2011.
Labels: 2024, Glasgow, John Grant, review, Robert Malcolm, Scotland, The Art Of The Lie Tour
