Love Is Magic

On Love Is Magic, John Grant lets the electronics that have lurked around the edges of his music since 2013's Pale Green Ghosts finally take center stage. To make his fourth solo album, he recruited Ben "Benge" Edwards, with whom he worked on Mr. Dynamite, the debut from his dark electro-pop side project Creep Show. Though this transformation was a long time coming, it's still remarkable just how liberating it is for Grant's music: He switches even more nimbly from cutting wit to heartache to romance, both ironic and genuine, on Love Is Magic's snarky funk-pop and sentimental ballads. On "Metamorphosis," synths blare as Grant recites grim and absurd non sequiturs in his booming baritone, then swirl in an echo of the free-floating anxiety about his sobriety and the 1995 death of his mother that swallows the the song like a sinkhole. Throughout the album, Edwards' electronics act like a hall of mirrors, reflecting and refracting Grant's fondness for nostalgia (and his even greater fondness for subverting it).