Yet her humanness has been bleeding through the prints from the beginning. Her intent is to get everyone sucked in before naysayers have a chance to WTF. And we have, absolutely - recall how our not caring has been taken as physical law on this album recall the IV-drip of all we have dosed upon. For our part, now that she’s asking something of us, we feel we’ve been spoiled. To be human to be familiar to be unadorned: if a kernel like that signals weakness, it’s weakness carefully-chosen and -cultivated, and on an album whose fabric is constantly bending around fears, uncertainties, and desires, its nakedness is as close to a spotlight and a promise of humanity as Boucher will get. No one knows if she can be human once again we’ve enlisted Boucher, we had believed, to help us forget that. It’s a vulnerable, and melodically shy, sexual invitation - wiped mascara, hands folded neatly. It’s a rare, giddying thing to hear such blatant DIY accidentals over a high-fructose 4/4 electro whomp. Or, an even better example, that appliance-like hum in the middle of “Oblivion,” jamming out as if it weren’t at some oblique angle to the key of the song. The MJ-nodding bassline transposed to a midi keyboard octave in “Vowels=Space and Time” stands alone, sexy-because-affectless, and, like so much else on the album, ridiculous in a way that doesn’t derail the groove. Another TMTer mentioned Maria Minerva, which seemed off to me at first, but then I started to hear how this could be the sort of acuity that exists inside Minerva’s head when she shimmies over some canned beat. Grimes’ first two albums winked in Visions’ direction but felt so enmeshed in DIY outsider art (her own shroomy Day-of-the-Dead cover art getting less and less accurate to her music) that their eccentricities were a little mushy or ill-defined by comparison. The shorthand is that if we have trouble getting behind an artist ‘selling out’ or indulging pop as flagrantly as Boucher does here, it’s because said indulgences rarely end up sharpening the contrast between the artist and the surrounding cultural landscape.
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