If “Albertine” showed us Grace McLean’s ability to subvert the sonic course, to take us by the hand and lead us from the familiar to the unexpected, then anticipating a whole album of such music in the form of, My Lovely Enemy was something that I was looking forward to. And that time is now upon us.
As expected, not that expectation is something that you should hold on to too tightly when navigating this mercurial album, things get creative and unconventional right from the word go, and the opener and title track is a brilliantly unpredictable thing, running on a sort of Chasson-pop poise driving along on a frisson of skittering energy, a strange blend of 50’s underground cafe culture and cutting edge, neo-soul creativity.
And from such an unusual start, as we move along, things don’t get any easier to pin down, but the best music will always do that to you, so for once, I will have to earn my money. “Reckless” is a strange pop tune that seems on the cusp of Orient and Occident, Eastern tradition and Western groove. “Day Satisfaction” is a brilliantly creative clash of The Beatles and The Stones best-known songs put to a sort of robotic, jazz-scat array, perhaps a way of finishing the job that Devo started all those years ago.
But there is still room for songs that follow more conventional lines, and “Ocean Vapour” wanders along some more expected, but not totally conventional, soul-pop lines.
Although it is easy, in hindsight anyway, to look at what is going on here, dissect it, and look inside. As a reviewer, all I have to do is reverse engineer music, but how do you write music that is wild, off-beat, boundary-pushing, and brilliant in the first place? I guess if I knew the answer to that, I would be turning heads and re-tuning ears, like Grace McLean does, rather than just writing about those who do.
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