Active Child, You Are All I See
Reviewed by: Chris Bosman
Pat Grossi plays the harp. This is immediately apparent from the very first moments of You Are All I See, the latest release from Grossi under his Active Child moniker. The title track opens with cascades of overdubbed harps that trickle down like rainwater from over a cliff embankment, or icicles over an awning, depending on how warm you find the atmospherics of his music. And there’s been a decent amount of it mentioned in the press that’s come around Grossi’s latest record. So, yes, Grossi plays the harp. If that were all there was to You Are All I See, that’d be all the further people would go with his music. Thankfully, the latest Active Child release is a lush, gorgeous release that uses Grossi’s unique instrument merely as an ornament in service of his more important talent: songwriting.
There are a lot of sonic touchpoints you can pull from You Are All I See. From the harp, people will of course point to Joanna Newsom. Grossi’s delicate, yearning voice can sound as if its beamed in from Johann Johannsson’s Englaborn or, when Grossi goes operatic, Antony Hegarty. And the similarities between his sensuous arrangements and How to Dress Well’s are apropos enough that HtDW’s Tom Krell duets with Grossi on “Playing House.” And Grossi might even have a kindred spirit in Zola Jesus’ Nika Roza Danilova. Like on Danilova’s Stridulum and Valusia EPs, beneath the towering testaments to the power of overdriven drum pads and harrowing synth chords lies a passion, a sensuality, that gives the tracks on You Are All I See a communicativity. A song like “Playing House” alternates between sounding like Drake, like Justin Timberlake, like the Weeknd.
But like any album worth its salt, You Are All I See is more than the sum of its composite influences. The Newsom reference stops at the harp. The combination of modern arrangements and classical influence of Englaborn falls far more into the modern scope than Johannsson’s decade-old record. Grossi is far less downtrodden than Hegarty. And while Krell ghosts away the frameworks of many of his tracks to find something more primal beneath, Grossi is just as likely to go lush and maximalist as he is likely to strip everything bare. Emotionally, there may be a connection to Zola Jesus, but Grossi injects a love of R&B into his tracks that Danilova avoids. On the flip side of the coin, the R&B star comparisons die with “Playing House.”
There are times when You Are All I See is too much. Once it’s blasted you with the pastoral thunder of its first half, you’ve almost become acclimated to it, like how the Final Destination and Saw franchises have to get more and more ridiculous because what they’ve done before is no longer surprising. By making tracks like “Hanging On” and “See Thru Eyes” his base line, Grossi dulls the effectiveness of otherwise powerful tracks like “Ancient Eye” and “High Priestess.”
Minor quibbles aside, though, You Are All I See is a triumphant piece of work from Grossi, who has been working away under the radar as Active Child since 2009. His sound has morphed since tracks like “I’m in Your Church at Night” or “Weight of the World.” It’s nice to see an artist who is working tirelessly on his craft come out with an album that fufills on the promise of their talents like this. It’s a strangely rare thing in the Internet age to see an artist mature, grow into themselves, like Grossi has done. And the payoff of You Are All I See is self-evident.