Special Discount John Grant – Love Is Magic

12.10.18
In collaboration with Benge (Ben Edwards), analogue synth expert /collector and a member of electronic trio Wrangler, Grant’scollaborators earlier this year under the collective name of Creep Showon the album Mr Dynamite. Anyone familiar with Grant’s story willrecognise his battles – with addiction and health, with trusting loveand relationships. From this turbulence he’s forged another rivetingcollection of often brutal diatribes and confessionals, where humour,fear, anxiety and anger overlap as Grant, with trademark candour,figuratively exposes the machinations of his saturated brain. It’sepitomised by the album’s brilliant opener Metamorphosis, almost as if his warring psyches are facing up to one another, as impervious synth-pop and brain-on-fire imagery (“Tiki bar, rat soufflé, Buik regal, Marvin Gaye”) melts into dream-ballad introspection (“Questions left unanswered, spiritual extortion”) and back to synth-backed mania. The magic of love pervades in two gorgeous, magisterial ballads toward the end of the album, Is He Strange and The Common Snipe – referring to the wader bird that makes a unique ‘bleating’ sound by rubbing its tailfeathers together.