Review | Active Child - You Are All I See
Photo by Ricky Chapman
It’s been just one year since Active Child’s acclaimed EP launched his name. The moniker of Pat Grossi, Active Child’s first full-length album You Are All I See is out today and it’s everything and nothing that you’d expect.
As I was first listening to the album, I read a lot of tweets from others that all said the same thing: I thought I was going to hate this album, but I kind of love it. Which is a bit of what I was expecting as well. It’s different, fascinating, entrancing and
addicting.
The first track You Are All I See is what we’ve been expecting most from someone who grew up as a choir boy and has since progressed into an indie-pop, synthesizer-loving musician. The title track, with Grossi’s light and airy vocals and the multitudes of harps, sounds like something straight out of a church. One of the oldest tracks on the album, Grossi said he wrote it to convince
the girl he was seeing that she was the only one he wanted.
The album progresses through track after track of synth-assisted and harp-heavy tunes. Until somewhere in the middle things slow down. High Priestess might be that exact point. “Whatchya gonna do when you get back home?”, Grossi questions as the background noises create a distinct landscape around his voice. But to imply that there are just two versions of Active Child would be misleading. There’s also R&B influences and simple hymn-like lyrics. And amazingly, there are bits and pieces of all of these on every track. Each song in itself is beautiful, but for entirely different reasons.
For someone who has opened for James Blake, and been compared to Bon Iver in Woods, Active Child is really a familiar and unfamiliar sound. Right now, we can place him in this genre of falsetto voices and synth-assisted beautiful indie tunes. But based on the unexpected surprises he slipped into his debut album, Active Child is sure to be someone to watch.
You can catch Active Child at Brighton Music Hall on September 12th. And you can grab the album here.