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). The album's luminous sounds underscore the disconnect in Grant's words -- on the title track, he sings "And this thing called intimacy/Isn't what you always thought it would be" over synths that glitter like stardust -- or decay into something more complicated than just yearning for the past. On "Tempest," childhood memories of Grant's arcade favorite and "the wastelands of the American mall" combine in glowing harmonies and synthetic explosions sampled from the video game.

1		Metamorphosis
2		Love Is Magic
3		Tempest
4		Preppy Boy
5		Smug Cunt
6		He's Got His Mother's Hips
7		Diet Gum
8		Is He Strange
9		The Common Snipe
10		Touch and Go

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