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201V: Daniel Brockman’s Top 10 Songs of 2015

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10. Grimes, “ReaLiTi [demo]” [self-released]

Art Angels, the years-in-the-making follow-up to 2012’s Visions, is in retrospect clearly a disappointment for fans of Claire Boucher a/k/a Grimes, a relatively hit-less product that spins in a zillion directions but never really connects. It’s clear that the album had numerous stops and re-dos, and in a sense a vital and dynamic artist like Grimes is probably not suited to the high-pressure-album-release model that resulted in Art Angels, especially when she is capable of casually dropping off genius productions like this, the orphaned demo version of “ReaLiTi”, to the winds of the Internet. The same song shows up on the album proper, but the charm has been removed– Boucher clearly gave herself too much time to tamper with something that was perfect already, a glum-yet-bouncy dance number that is the sonic equivalent of skipping across the globe in buoyant neon tennis shoes, bounding mountains in single swift motions. “I peered over the edge and saw death”, she gently intones, giving gravity to the frictionless flight, making real the fantasy, merging the kitch and the horrific in the effortless manner that has always been the hallmark of the best of Grimes’s work.

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