Last night Grant played an impressive set showcasing material from his latest album, Grey Tickles, Black Pressure. It’s a work I’ve been having some difficulty with – some of the lyrics are maybe a tad arch – but seeing him live won me over. Even lines like ‘You and Hitler ought to get together/You ought to learn to knit and wear matching sweaters’ work when sung with such gleeful bitterness.
A lot of musical ground is covered, from the funk of Voodoo Doll to the Torch Song-esque Caramel to the Grace Jones-inspired Snug Slacks. My own favourite Grant track, Marz, is one of the best songs of the last few years and it gets a knock-out rendition: it’s one of those tracks which makes me feel almost woozy every time I hear it. It’s other-worldly, ethereal and easily the best song to list the names of various candies since the Beatles’ Savoy Truffle.
When you think of Grant you tend to think of angst, and his beautiful, heart-breaking work like the transcendent Glacier – wait, maybe that’s my favourite Grant track. Or perhaps it’s GMF which is making me choke up even as I write this. Anyway, my point is that he can also be incredibly playful and very funny. Snug Slacks is the kind of track which makes you laugh and dance at the same time, ‘You know it takes as ass like yours to make it possible for me/To have developed such a very high tolerance for inappropriate behaviour’. Its knowing sense of its absurdity taken with the lubriciousness of the rest of the lyrics make it one of the greatest queer songs since Jagger’s Memo From Turner.
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