Frill wave feminism, perhaps..?

[Video][Website]
[6.60]

Alfred Soto: Keyboard flourishes and multitracked delicateness — what could go wrong?
[6]

Brad Shoup: Jeez, this crust-punk record is terrible.
[5]

Pete Baran: There is an aspect of this twinkly bit of ambience that suggests its being sung down a disused train tunnel in Earlsfield with the occasional train going over the still extant lines. It does feel a little like excavating a hitherto unseeing strain of ambient trip-hop from the mid-nineties, and to be fair if it had existed then I would have been all over it. Basically the kind of track that will always do well if you review it on a Sunday morning.
[7]

Anthony Easton: This sounds like the Hidden Cameras, but with more electronic screens added to it — maybe a Photoshop remix of the original images that the Cameras tried to make work– but all that added baggage makes the openness turn into a kind of obsessive and hermetic tendency. For work that is about desire, the obsessive and hermetic often work as a kind of interior maze. I am not sure if this makes the music more interesting, but the piano is pretty enough that it might just sway me. 
[6]

Will Adams: Someone likes the pentatonic scale!
[5]

Jonathan Bogart: Hey, you know those other Grimes songs you’ve heard? Here’s another one of them.
[6]

Alex Ostroff: Look, I’m basically baffled at this point. Visions is one of my favourite albums of the year. It’s Claire Boucher’s introduction (more or less) to a broader audience, after two very good but minor albums that were slighter and less pop-aspirational. There are thirteen tracks from which to select singles. These songs include the actual-serious-pop-contender ‘Be a Body (侘寂)‘ (for which a video was apparently filmed back in April) and ‘Skin‘, a heartbreakingly beautiful ballad whose words and meaning it is possible to divine – atypically, for Grimes. Given this, I have no idea why the latest single (accompanied by a bonkers video that appropriates a little too much voguing for me to be entirely comfortable) is a song that was released as a teaser for Visions as far back as February. It’s pretty, catchy and repetitive, and it’s another murky, thin production being tossed out when there are hidden gems that could actually win people over. When Ciara or Mariah’s albums tank due to poor single selection, the blame lies at the feet of label interference. As much as Claire loves R&B divas (and rightfully so!) she retains enough control to direct the videos herself, so emulating this particular aspect of her idols’ careers is kind of annoying.
[7]

Patrick St. Michel: I caught Grimes’ live show a few weeks back, and it was jammed full of creepy backmasking and Skrillex-aspiring bass drops.  Then came the video for “Genesis,” high on Heavy Metal and 90’s anime vibes.  Claire Boucher is running with the whole convoluted “post-Internet” image now, but the songs on Visions usually work because they aren’t all that strange.  “Genesis” is the most straightforward of the bunch and also the best, nothing more than some synth, a propulsive-but-simple beat and Boucher’s airy vocals.  It’s great, bouncy pop capable of making you forget the whole Pussy Ring deal.     
[9]

Katherine St Asaph: It’s an indictment of something, either of my listening habits or her work, that though she’s existed in my musical world for half a year now I have no firm sense of Grimes as an artist. I own her album. I’m pretty sure I’ve heard it the whole way through, multiple times. I know roughly what she’s about. But when I think of Grimes, nothing sticks, certainly nothing musical. I remember: the time I was having drinks with a guy who told me about his crush on Claire Boucher, the one he said all guys have, at which point I glanced at my brunette, fleshy, Carole Littled self in some mirror and knew I was not Grimes (yet dot tumblr dot com). The time I tried to explain “post-Internet” to a companion so pre-Internet he spends an hour a day online en route to seeing her live — a stage show a coworker told me was a terrible idea but one I still can’t imagine, because the place was so packed we gave up. The time an acquaintance gushed about her photo with her, posed and accessorized by a wall. The times she tweets about ever-more-stylish things and people. The time, which is every time, I half-picture Grimer when I read her name. Am I just lazy, is my brain permanently scattered — or is this what happens with someone all context and signifiers? I hear “Genesis,” note the pentatonic seagull music, the piano lines crisp as MIDI sequences, Boucher’s voices hollow like tubular bells or air conditioning, the drum and bass, the contrails left in. I think it sounds like she sampled a day spa and wonder how earnest she is. I read the lyrics because I have no idea what she’s cooing about, and wonder how she’s been repeating “my heart will never feel” with no emotional weight whatsoever. The song fades out after four minutes and fades from memory within five. On the album, at least, it’s almost an intro. As a single, I don’t understand.
[6]

Iain Mew: If I’m to break this down further, it’s really a [10] for the first minute and a [7] for everything else, some of which actually surprised me when it came up. The start is both one of the finest selections of gorgeous sounds on Visions and one of the rare occasions that they’re attached to something solid enough to give them direction – the synth line does the groundwork to make the whooshes and spaceflutes and “my heart…” so amazing.
[9]