Review: Grimes @ Fortune Sound Club – Feb 18th

Our rainy little city has been spoiled for the last little while since alternative music’s brightest rising star has been giving this city a lot of love. Grimes has taken over some serious air space with her latest album “Visions.” You can’t take two clicks anywhere online without seeing her face, and she’s even been approached to model for Vogue. With all this going on, she’s done several shows and DJ sets in Vancouver over a small handful of months The latest one being on February 18th at Fortune Sound Club.

You can tell the hype was in full swing. The fairly spacious Chinatown club was packed to the brim with anxious fans. It was hard not too have very high expectations at this point, but here’s how things boil down.

The lady herself, Claire Boucher, is an entrancing performer and a virtuoso of her craft. Aside from a few guest performance from the opening act Born Gold, Grimes performs alone, and still manages to emit a sonic landscape with what seems like an effortless twiddle of knobs. Her new single, Genesis, pounded like a cyborg marching band underneath slithering, intertwined melodies of her overlapping vocal chords. Her voice is the main entree of the music, and she is a virtuoso of brave new territory. Boucher is downright pleasing to watch; she’s calm and confident, and conveys her music convincingly in the way she meanders and sways about the stage. Her act feels refreshing and genuine because you don’t get to experience anything like Grimes. She’s a beautiful, young female, with very diverse artistic influences, and she puts on a seriously elaborate electronic musical performance.

The only thing that held her back were some technical issues and microphone feedback that occasionally roused you from dreamland. Speculation says she’s controlling all her equipment herself and not letting the sound tech deal with these issues which is a hard leap of faith for any musician to make but should be done. With that being said, you can tell when an artists has surpassed the trial grounds, when technical issues are a small brush fire in the grand scheme of a show. Let’s hope she wasn’t too deterred by the rain and will come back to Vancouver soon after she takes over the world.

Grimes – Crystallball (Young Galaxy Remix) by The Music Snob Militia

Reviewed by @EstabanBelChere

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