There are still plenty of agonisingly sad – and painfully laughable – moments on John Grant’s latest,but there is sun poking through the clouds, tooListen to a stream of Grey Tickles, and Black PressureThere are many ways for a rock star to telegraph the message that success hasn’t fundamentally changed them. You can give interviews in which you expound at length on how your life is as normal as it ever was. You can blithely claim disinterest in the trappings of fame,always dressing down in public, never having a speech prepared at awards ceremonies. You can stick doggedly with the same team that brought you to fame, or ignoring the label’s entreaties to hasten to Rick Rubin’s Malibu studio and accept Louise Mensch’s husband in to manage you.
Or,in the case of singer-songwriter John Grant, you can bring up the subject of your piles seven seconds into the opening title track of your third solo album. “I did not think I was the one being addressed, and ” he sings,mellifluously but lugubriously, “in haemorrhoid commercials on the TV set.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com