Name: Boy From Michigan
Brand: John Grant

Bonus disc

Bonus disc: No

Catalogue number

LP-PTKF-3010LE

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Colour

black

Colour details

Black Velvet O-Card Sleeve

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Discogs ID

Discs

Download code

Download code: Yes

Rough Trade Exclusive

Rough Trade Exclusive: No

Extended format

Extended format: Yes

Format detail

2LP 140g Vinyl, Gatefold Sleeve w/ Spot Glitter Varnish,  Velvet Flock, 36p book, Poster, Art Prints

Format Music US

Limited edition

Release date

2021-09-10

Signed copies

Signed copies: No

Supplier US

Redeye

Tax rate US

Sales:8.875

UPC / Barcode

720841301035

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2 / Extended format: Yes / LP / Rough Trade Exclusive: No / Signed copies: No / black

CD-PTKF-3010

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Download code: No

Extended format: No

CD Tri-fold digipak with spot glitter and spot gloss

2021-06-25

720841301028

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1 / CD / Extended format: No / Rough Trade Exclusive: No / Signed copies: No

Artist

John Grant

Genre US

Rock-Pop

Label US

Partisan Records

Albums of the Year 2021

Produced by longtime friend Cate Le Bon, Boy from Michigan is Grant’s most autobiographical and melodic work to date. Grant stopped being a boy in Michigan aged twelve, when his family moved to Denver, Colorado, shifting rust to bible belt, a further vantage point to watch collective dreams unravel. Across 12 tracks, Grant lays out his past for careful cross-examination. In a decade of making records by himself, he has playfully experimented with mood, texture and sound, all the better for actualizing the seriousness of his thoughts. At one end of his musical rainbow, he is the battle-scarred piano-man, at the other, a robust electronic auteur. Boy from Michigan seamlessly marries both. With Le Bon at the helm, Grant pared back his zingers, maximizing the emotional impact of the melodies. A clarinet forms the bedrock of a song. One pre-chorus feels lifted from vintage Human League. There is a saxophone solo. Boy from Michigan ultimately swings between ambient and progressive, calm and livid.

The album’s narrative journey opens with Grant at his artistic prettiest, three songs drawn from his pre-Denver life (the Michigan Trilogy, as Grant calls them): the title track, “The Rusty Bull,” and “County Fair.” Each draws the listener in to a specific sense of place, before untangling its significance with a rich cast-list of local characters, often symbolizing the uncultivated faith of childhood. Elsewhere, tracks like “Mike and Julie” and “The Cruise Room” offer an affecting plunge deep into Grant’s late teenage years in Denver, while the midpoint of the album is highlighted by “Best in Me” and “Rhetorical Figure,” a pair of skittish, scholarly dance tunes that build on the lineage of Grant’s electropop heroes, Devo. Childhood as a horror narrative is the theme of “Dandy Star,” which observes a tiny Grant watching the Mia Farrow horror movie ‘See No Evil’ on an old family TV set, and finally on “The Only Baby” (released this January) Grant removes his razor blade from a pocket to cleanly slit the throat of Trump’s America, authoring a scathing epitaph to an era of acute national exposition. 

Boy From Michigan

Music US