GRENTPEREZ – BACKFLIPS IN A RESTAURANT: REVIEW

GRENTPEREZ

Backflips In A Restaurant (Awal)

THERE ARE SOME MUSICAL DECISIONS you can look at and say, well they know their business, and business is their game. The sound is very now, the marketing on point, and the style meets every topical requirement of the people in corner offices with KPIs to hit this quarter. Give them an ARIA/Golden Guitar already.

Grant Pérez, or grentperez as he styles himself in a world too busy for capitals, spelling, and space between words, is not one of them. Has not been one of them since turning up five years ago as a teenager with a gossamer-light voice (that you might hear as similar to Andy Bull) and some is-he-serious affection for gossamer-light pop (that you might hear as similar to Jens Lekman).

Yes, I hear you, those are two comparisons that for some would be the milkshake that brings us to the yard. But then there’s any number of reasons why you and I are never going to run a record label or pump out an industry newsletter, and that’s just one. Back in the real world there are two things about that to explain why this debut album immediately rules him out of any KPI discussions.

For some listeners he may well sound as if he teeters on the line between affection and parody, smart and smart-arsey, but you can’t be sure which side he learns – and no one makes money confusing a significant section of the market. Even worse, he makes the kind of pop music that hasn’t been in vogue for more than four decades, and even then it was hardly what you would call cool – and no one makes money being uncool and out of time.

Luckily then, Pérez seems oblivious to common sense.

Whether in a slow soul ballad like Girl At The Station (imagine a teenage Michael Jackson swooning to Gordon Jenkins’ strings), a beachside bossa nova like Falling For A Friend, or the shimmering easy country trot of Everest (picture Susan Raye’s LA International Airport merging with something from The 5th Dimension), he takes the – harder than it sounds and so easy to get it wrong – easy listening options.

I don’t mean yacht rock by the way: most of the time this album does not reach for the jazzed-up groove button, doesn’t suggest evening cocktails or tip into anything like disco. Unlike fellow Australian, and recent visitor here, Joel Sarakula, Pérez is not obviously on close terms with Steely Dan’s oeuvre and would probably choose Shaun and David Cassidy over Jeff and Steve Porcaro.

So Need You Around’s skippity chorus comes out of a children’s rhythm box beat, the creaminess of the piano and rising aaahs of the backing vocals in Fuzzy Feeling is paired with a melody that a certain B. Manilow would have killed for, and Headspace comes running at you like a just-freed puppy ready to love you.

Even when he dials up a more contemporary processed beat in Dandelion (a duet with the slightly deeper-voiced Ruel) and Movie Scene, Pérez lays a featherweight vocal over them, more delicate than demanding in the former, more boy band ballad than boorish bloke in the latter. And in the almost modern 2DK (It’s got a rap! It’s got a bass that, politely, knocks at the door! He has sex!) the rhythm’s nodding-not-prodding lope smooths a path.

You have to like pop music to enjoy Backflips In A Restaurant, because grentperez does and he is not hiding it. And maybe that’s not you. But really, why should it be hard to like pop music when it’s much more fun than business?

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