When you think of Swedish girls, what does your mind immediately present? Me too, but no, not that. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, by any means. The other thing! The thing that’s actually true about Swedish girls. It isn’t just the climate from which they flurry down, carrying their bespoke snowflakes in Petite Malle bags, and it isn’t just your imagination either: they truly are the coolest girls. This is the one and only fair comparison with anyone else that can be made of GRANT, Sweden’s best musical export since the spritely divinity of Robyn. GRANT is every bit as double-blinded cool as her Norse goddess counterparts, but forward from that she shares space with no one, and is locative only with her own inner tundra. With her latest EP entitled Vertigo, she has crafted a suite of songs that are fleet of foot in the way of jewel thieves, safecrackers, stolen gold, and forbidden love.
In the roulette of rock, there is a set of rouge heritage codes belonging to stunning redheaded women that can be likened in some ways to the good kind of witch hysteria. We are not referring here to the tired commentary on their callidity, their inner salt and turf fire, the way most of them have a fair mouth for spirits, or the fact that nary a one gives a fiddler’s fuck. These are all just reasons to curtsy when you see them. The point here is rather that something in their chromatography allows them a different kind of free stroll down the darkest streets of the heart. It doesn’t even matter if the red is dyed in. The scarlet power and the garnet privilege seep as easily by coin as by birthright. There is a magic redhead thing happening here for GRANT, for sure. It is like Freya Ridings but with a Shirley Manson filter. The Tori Amos kind of fey confessional through a Florence Welch witchiness of timbre. Bonnie Raitt if she did a fair amount of blow and then got unceremoniously dumped by her track-suit-wearing loser boyfriend out the back of a techno club in Malmö.
The fact that GRANT’s given name is Alma Caroline Cederlöf does more than fit, as “Alma” is a name Tennessee Williams employed for no less than three separate characters, and this is a very Summer and Smoke kind of record. Though the etymology of “Alma” imbues the name with the appropriate uplifting delicateness to bear the truth of this adjuvant girl, her connection to vaulted icons of refined masculinity becomes more engrossing once you realize that she has derived her stage name from Cary GRANT himself. Names transfer so much in any realm, but in the world of GRANT they become symbolic pack-spirit-animals, carrying the current over the ice. Whether she named her smashing 2018 debut full-length In Bloom in salute to one of the greatest Nirvana songs ever written, or because she herself was about to unfurl artistic petals of a hue and rarity equivalent to old school grunge, that moniker suits too. Named “Newcomer of the Year” at the 2019 Swedish Grammy Awards and “Artist of the Future” at Swedish National Radio P3, GRANT has already quite successfully scrawled her pizzicato signature cure across cities where Sif set foot.
Earthfast pop music without today’s collateralized logo saturation is a nervy micro-district to say the least. Most of the artists who dare to attempt it these days work like mycologists in the dirt and the dark, and get little more than a soiled dress and a turned ankle for their efforts. GRANT has somehow dodged the carnival artillery of the social media senseis, and emerged victorious with a piece of transmedia storytelling that is full of ambilogy and ambition. As a bioassay of where she is as a woman and an artist right now, Vertigo is both a mimeograph and a geoglyph. It renders and it reminds. She is hyperlinking directly into the softest instantiations of the human emotional experience and then setting them with sugar. They are hard, but they are very, very sweet.
Lead track “Don’t Recall Growing Old” troops the corpsing colors of a Romantic being forced into the shuttle diplomacy required of relationships that occur outside books. It touches on that often learned-too-late reality that, in relationships, some people are born forgers while others must learn the trade by bent of practiced necessity. The retro-techno mazed mirror installation of the video furthers the theme of coming to terms with the way we all dress up the treasured mathoms of our marriages (even to our former selves) in moire to try to keep them pretty and pliable long after their best use date.
If you are waiting for the lilty one (as I always am), it is the second track of Vertigo, entitled simply “Words.” This one calls to mind Heather Nova’s “Paper Cup” in mood, and blithely ensorcels your best wheat-pasted efforts not to cry at its sheer melancholy beauty with the same dexterity, turning a familiar, much-missed spigot. “Words,” true to form, is as much a standalone poem as it is a natural basement ballad:
Light like your touch, doesn’t taste much
But they would make me blush
Air through your lungs, shaped by your tongue
How could they raise the young?
It is an elegy to the manner in which certain beliefs regarding a person can bleed into new imagery against our will or awareness, and how we fight that pentimento quality that occurs after our self-realization meets that infernal bastard known as time. The two-string guitar rhythm animating GRANT’s own tumbling words here mimics the kind of thousand-watt acoustic heartbeat you hear in your own body only when you are especially nervous or awfully excited in front of another person. It was perhaps the colossal John Donne that last so breathtakingly captured the potency of a lover’s breath–and what it can mean, what it can do (or undo).
“Hell Yes, I’m Betting On You” is a vespiary of hidden thoughts and big-chamber sounds stuck on a pricket, with a little bit of Annie Lennox for good measure. Lyrics like “all this unraveling in your car/takes us places and sometimes just far ” draw an architectural blueprint of the place where trenchant meets trussed, but daringly do so in pen, not pencil. It’s a song about that moment you first come to the crushing realization that someone you love has come to view you as a sinecure, at best. In a tempo shift worthy of Prince, this gem then devolves into disarticulated, classic house beats at the end, and one envisions GRANT twirling away from the boredom-inducing partner, mid-squall.
“Vertigo,” the titular track, has been saved for the end, and for good reason as the end is where we are taught all dessert things must wait. Here, GRANT has baked you a bifurcated ear-cookie about the way that love will mercilessly take a shillelagh to what you thought it was going to be like, but she has used CBD oil to grease the pan and thus even though the song is about the anxiogenics of passion and obsession, it sounds like soaring away on an ayahuasca moonbeam. Who knows what kind of escape velocity you would need to outrun the experience of how disappointing nearly all lovers are–pretty sure it’s out past Mach 5 somewhere and even Voyager 1 can’t get there–but at least we have now been gifted this tuneful train by GRANT, and it makes some pretty pit stops along the route to being content on your own cloud.
There is a universe of difference between eager and ardent. GRANT is not living for refracted glory like pastinaceous girls who only talk or think of love are wont to do. She’s a little scholar of emotional mysteries, presenting them like debutantes in periwinkle stays through the prism of her volcanello heart. Alt-pop has not been done under a canopy this conscious since Nina Gordon went solo from Veruca Salt. What is wonderful about GRANT’s Valentine’s Day Ball is that it is thrown in honor of the light-skirts in the red-light district. Rather than rich slags in eel-skin shifts inciting imbroglios with fashed sprusados, this dance is filled with characters wearing pelisses they made by tearing the baize off the pool table, and they appear to be playing Bond Baccarat with the croupiers as they all watch new possibilities roll in on the dawn tide. As for the Bible-black ovations associated with our society’s emphasis on coupledom, the burnished defenses GRANT sets glancingly shining on Vertigo should tell you she has earned her spurs. If she is kept wakeful with elation now, it’s likely to do with something less cytotoxic than the common man’s definition of “love.” New listeners to GRANT, however, are in for a permanent infatuation–and perhaps not a small bit of dizziness in the head.
