A track title like ‘Birth in Reverse’ doesn’t
create the most appealing mental image, but such is the surreal wonderland of
Annie Clark’s imagination, where darkness hums beneath a colourful lustre of
charming and cheerful eccentricity. Historically, St. Vincent’s sound played like
a neurotic Disney soundtrack; beautiful and stargazy, even angelic, but
harbouring a real edge, like a razorblade buried in a bowl of sherbert. In the
five years since then her confidence has an artist has skyrocketed, and she
continues with the magical strangeness of her unique musical personality, only
this time with a heightened sense of awareness and self-assurance. While her
previous albums always had a youthful shyness about them, the St. Vincent we
have with us here today is her same recognisably oddball self, but the coyness
present on her previous releases has vanished. It’s all there on the album
cover – staring confidently out at you from her throne, with her majestic gown
and her snow-queen hairstyle. This is a self-titled album, after all, and all
of this seems to indicate a bold new direction for gorgeously-minded superstar St. Vincent, and here, after four(ish) long years since she last haunted the minds of every hipster in the Western world, she's back with a pink, kitsch dreadnought of an album.
Upon immediate first listen, then, this
album signals a change of course in Clark’s artistic trajectory beyond the classically
wistful coffee-shop insecurity that we all fell in love with from the Marry Me era onwards, and instead seems to
have moved definitively towards a new frontier of futuristic kitsch, a
retrofuturistic combination of the 1980s, the 2010s, and god knows when and
what else. After all, here in 2014, the world is in the throes of a
particularly futuristic-looking and breakneck-fast transition into god knows
what, and this album’s standard-bearer ‘Digital Witness’ is probably the most
apparent instance of St. Vincent looking outward as opposed to inward, as the
entire song sounds, at least from one interpretation, like a sarcastic diatribe
about our newfound obsession with validating our own lives in the abstract world
of social media: “If I can’t show it, you can’t see me, what’s the point of
doing anything?” The spreading tendrils of the internet have been the cause of
immense social and cultural upheaval amongst the human race for the past twenty
years or so, but so far St. Vincent is the only musician I’ve heard who has managed
to address this revolution directly and effectively, as if she’s not even
trying. “Pleasure.loathing.huey.newton” she coos in the song where the late
Black Panther is “entombed in a shrine of zeroes and ones” – and she’s right; he’s
staring out at me from his Wikipedia page as we speak.
I’ve never given her much credit for this
before, but Annie Clark is an incredibly nuanced lyricist as well as a musical
prodigy. There’s a lot being said in her metaphor-laden verses and choruses
that I dread to think has gone unnoticed by my own self, but the depth of lines
such as “a smile is more than showing teeth” and the syllabic revelry of lines
like “summer is as faded as a lone cicada call” reveal a St. Vincent as dextrous
in the brain as in her guitar-slaying fingers. Her collaborator and friend, New
Wave Grand Duke David Byrne, says that “despite having toured with her for
almost a year, I don’t think I know her much better, at least on a personal
level”, so as a mere musical civilian I expect that trying to find a path via
this album into the machinations of Annie Clark herself and all of her possibly
intended meanings may end up proving fruitless, but imagery like “headless
heroes heaped by the pylons as a careless sun sets on the West” is semantic
dynamite, and this album is as lyrically dense and ferocious as Strange Mercy, if not impressively
superior. The world that these songs inhabit is bright, colourful, and
uncannily strange in its representation of the modern life of its creator.
Annie Clark’s always been talented, there’s
never been any doubt about that, but it’s instantly apparent that on the
musical side of her fourth album, she’s upped her own creative ante. Her Renaissance-woman
arsenal of abilities is sharpened to divine levels; this album is an absolute
wealth of sounds, instruments, moods and movements, all arranged, performed and
produced tightly and with a clear embrace of the buzzing-metal-and-plastic
sound she’s built out of the synthesiser love carried over from the last album.
‘Bring Me Your Loves’ is a stomper; the sound of St. Vincent thrashing around a
chaotic chamber of whirrs, crackles and hisses, sounding as far removed from
her human side as she’s dared to stray yet. ‘I Prefer Your Love’ is a
stopping-point halfway through the album, a break from the laser-light synths
and roaring guitars, it’s a ballad dedicated to her mum where she tells her
“all the good in me is because of you” (how bloody sweet is that, aw); soft and
shimmering and lovely in contrast to the track formerly mentioned. ‘Birth in
Reverse’ is noisy and shrill but somehow St. Vincent has this ability to find
beautiful melody in the sharpest and strangest artificial sounds, tied together
with her voice that is part desperation, part confidence, part siren. The
mythological kind.
With this album, St. Vincent has gone
nuclear. Marry Me and Actor were sparkling drops of acid
wistfulness, Strange Mercy was sadder,
sharper and better, and while I’m not saying that this newest effort is
definitively better than Strange Mercy in any way, shape or form,
it has a clarity in its construction – the observant internet-age futurism, the
blending of usual art-indie songwriting with weirder sounds and elements, the
swift and effortless transitions between notably different but consistently
vibrant moods. You can tell that this is an album that’s going to cement St.
Vincent’s place in the pantheon of this slice of history’s acclaimed musicians.
She’s ferociously gifted, in weaving her music, in sculpting her own image, in
making songs from the (don’t vomit) ‘art-rock’ side of the playing field that
can be beautiful, ferocious, uplifting, tense, abrasive, soft and electrifying all
at once; exciting to witness, and so uniquely St. Vincent. I’d be surprised if
there was an ear on the planet who didn’t find something joyous to step to in
this LP, which has proven that if you’re searching for a modern-day musical
idol to venerate, you could do a fucktonne of a lot worse than Annie Clark.
