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This Is Dedicated to the One I Love

It's showbiz cliché to pay lip-service love to fans —usually on stage at awards shows, proclaiming "without you I wouldn't be here"— but who before has bothered to write them a love song? Pat Grossi —the Californian carrot-top calling himself Active Child— dares kick off his debut LP with a devotional dedicated to his audience; not as general gesture towards the faceless masses, but sung sweetly to the listener, singular.


"If you think you're ready," the ex-choirboy carols, on opening, as invitation into a 41-minute-long, two-way relationship. And You Are All I See is an affair to remember. Grossi sings in a fruity falsetto that comes in wave after wave of warbling vocals; he sounding a lot like a grown man still trying to be a childhood chorister. Singing in a falsetto bordering on castrato, hitting helium high-notes en masse, his voice multi-tracked 'til he's a choir of queer angels swimming in the rafters, beaming near the ceiling.

Grossi constructs kooky cathedrals of sound out of unexpected component parts: angelic harp thrums, soft keyboard washes, ersatz drum-pad plunks, Knife-styled pitch-shifted vocals. Compositionally speaking, he's like some avant-garde architect synthesizing styles that have no business being on the one blueprint. Yet, whilst the elements seem like mis-match —choral canticles, stadium new-wave, new-age synth waft, Quiet Storm slow-jams, medieval harp music— the construction is smooth, singular, and genuinely elegant.

And Grossi didn't build this grand shrine to God, but to you.

Fall in Love

When, mid-way into his love-song dedication, Grossi sings "I know we'll be fine," it's understatement bordering on comic. You Are All I See is no sane listener's idea of merely 'fine.' It's an album whose constructed forms of audio architecture befit its ambition. For Grossi hasn't just constructed his songs around the same set of strange component parts, yet assembled them into a brilliant whole; a suite whose tunes marry not just unexpected timbres together, but simplicity with complexity.

"I fall in love/way too fast," Grossi sounds out, again and again, on "Way too Fast," a stripped-down song sent to a barely-there pulse and synth sine-waves. It's a simple mantra for a supposedly-simple song, but as its five minutes build, the sonic details are many, varied, and constantly-changing; every suggestive microtone bent in a way that makes the queer tune genuinely strange.

The sentiment Grossi sings ("put my trust in you/way too fast/you didn't even say goodbye") holds across the LP; the songwriter's established persona, when placed within his glittering, ersatz, bedazzling cathedrals, essentially a variant on the choirboy-grown-up tone of his vocals. He's, still, but a boy: easily bruised by cold shoulders of casual dalliances and ill-suited paramours; a romantic more at home in his artistic dreams than in the coldness of reality. Even if it's in touch with the fucked-up, You Are All I See is a work of fantasy; and, bearing an invitation on opening, it's a world into which Grossi is happy to usher you.

Record Label: Vagrant
Release Date: August 23, 2011