St Vincent's "St. Vincent"

For 2012’s Record Store Day, Annie Clark knocked the wind out of all those familiar with her music with the “Krokodil”/”GROT” 7”, which took a sharp left turn from the unnervingly mannered indie pop of her first three records straight into a sweaty, violent mosh pit. Her full lengths have all been marked by a push-pull between a creeping sense of foreboding (which made Actor in particular so compelling) and a nervous, rattled energy (which was slightly more pronounced on 2011’s Strange Mercy). The songs on St. Vincent tend generally to skew more towards the latter than in the past, which goes some way towards making this Clark’s most immediately engaging album yet. And while there’s nothing here to match the sheer visceral power of that single, there’s no less subversion or experimentation going on throughout.

                

             This is important, because while all the signifiers of St. Vincent’s music are here--ghostly background vocals layered to sound like bad keyboard presets, sparing but deliberate displays of guitar virtuosity, etc.—they’re used to brighter, stranger ends, and the results can be as bracing as they are familiar. There’s no way, for example, that a song like “Bring Me Your Loves” should work, mashing together as it does a heavily-processed dial-tone guitar riff with simultaneously squealing and buzzing synths over a high school marching band drumbeat, with Clark’s double-tracked, distorted vocals barely keeping things grounded; for all that, it’s one of the most thrilling indie-pop songs yet to be released this year, and it’s surrounded by songs that match or surpass it for sheer replay value. Among these are the hyperactive “Birth in Reverse”, featuring some of her most impressive guitar acrobatics, the patiently building “Every Tear Disappears”, and “Digital Witness”, whose horn-led, Love This Giant-esque strut calls to mind Actor’s “Marrow”. Where that song was a desperate cry for help, however, this song is a self-absorbed plea for attention – “I want all of your mind… if I can’t show it, if you can’t see me/what’s the point in doing anything?”

                Clark’s lyrics elsewhere on the album can often be as off-kilter and surreal as the music, if not more so; the playful “oh-oh-ohs” and bouncy synths of opener “Rattlesnake” dress up an apparently true story of a near-death encounter with the titular animal in the Texas desert. “Huey Newton”, by turns clinically funky and aggressively fuzzy, is a disjointed stream-of-consciousness (“Feelings/flashcards/fake knife/real ketchup/cardboard/cutthroats/cowboys of information”) that gives way to a lament of technology’s effect on the narrator’s mind, “entombed in a shrine of zeroes and ones”. Fortunately, St. Vincent is equally compelling when it’s not letting its freak flag fly so high. The album’s ballads - “Prince Johnny”, “I Prefer Your Love”, and “Severed Crossed Fingers” – may lack the unsettling tension of her previous work, but they make up for it with confident, sticky melodies and some of Clark’s most illuminatingly personal writing. “Prince Johnny” in particular is the sort of subtle, compelling character study that Lana Del Rey’s been trying to write forever now (“You traced the Andes with your index/and brag of when and where and who you’re gonna bed next”), and it’s got a heart-fluttering chorus to boot. The song’s attention to detail, both lyrical and musical, is emblematic of Clark’s approach throughout St. Vincent; the most deliberate moments here are always the most brilliant. 

- Solomon Umana Solomon is currently in the KRTU Apprenticeship Class at Trinity  He'll have his own show any time now.