In the preview trailer for Grey Tickles, Black Pressure, American solo artist John Grant’s newest album, Grant, with his signature lazy growth of beard, is sporting a pastel polo, splattered in blood and wielding a croquet mallet. “It’s what I feel like doing every time someone calls me a faggot,” he told Outmagazine. Grant has a rich muse for his seething attitude; the former lead singer of The Czars publicly announced that he’s HIV-positive during a London concert with queer electro outfit Hercules & Love Affair.
The title behind Grey Tickles comes from two idioms, directly translated into English: “grey tickles,” which means mid-life crisis in Icelandic, while “black pressure” is derived from the Turkish word for nightmare. The catastrophe of Grant’s personality is in his dualistic hubris – he’s at once self-aggrandizing and self-loathing. In the title track of Grey Tickles, he fuses both his anxiety about his terminal HIV diagnosis (“there are children who have cancer / and so all bets are off / ’cause I can’t compete with that”) with levity and mundane hesitation (“I often stand and stare at nothing at the grocery store because I do not know what to buy to eat anymore”) in his honeyed baritone.
This bleak contrast of wit and depravity is how Grant pulls open the curtain on Grey Tickles, which follows his excellent previous releases, 2010’s Queen of Denmark and 2013’s Pale Green Ghosts. Grant gets sinister when he recruits The Dresden Dolls’ Amanda Palmer on the track “You and Him” to tell someone that he and a certain Führer would be better off settling into a cozy married life. Palmer, surrounded by a wall of abrasive synths, cries: “You and Hitler oughta get together; you oughta learn to knit and wear matching sweaters / You oughta learn the finer points of decoupage; you oughta spend your weekends cleaning out the garage.”
Other album standouts include “Snug Slacks,” a Frank Zappa pastiche, and “Black Blizzard,” in which Grant relays a weather report of apocalyptic Cormac McCarthy proportions.
Driven by his brutal confrontational style and candid, tongue-in-cheek lyricisms, Grant strikes a poignant and vulnerable pose as the kind of guy whose empathy and understanding of bigger problems only makes sense through his own myopic lens. This is manifest best when he harangues, “Global warming is ruining my fair complexion.”
John Grant is performing on Oct. 30 at Portland’s Doug Fir Lounge (830 E Burnside St). 21+ only. Tickets are $14-$15. Doors open at 8 p.m.; the show starts at 9 p.m.