Album Review: St. Vincent- Self-Titled

Tracking Annie Clark’s journey from what could be viewed as a post-Feist indie chanteuse to a legit, not to be fucked with “artist” is actually an easy process if you just look at the covers of her four albums released under the moniker St. Vincent.

Starting with her debut in 2007, Marry Me’s rather plain and simple cover photo of her was a well-suited match to the relatively straightforward music that accompanied the album. Sure there are some precocious moments on the first half, but it mellows out as it winds down to a close.

Two years later on Actor, everything was much brighter—the packaging structured around bold colors, and the cover photo (while still of her face) was a much tighter shot. Also—dat bone structure, am I right?

Musically, Actor was a rather huge leap for her. Rougher around the edges at times, it also showcased the complexities in her arrangements that she would explore further two years after that on Strange Mercy.

Clark and her cheekbones did not appear on the cover of Strange Mercy, opting instead for a somewhat unsettling image of her mouth, open, covered by what appears to be some kind of plastic sheeting.

And now here we are, two more years later, with the arrival of St. Vincent, with Clark proudly back on the front cover; her black hair now dyed a striking platinum white, sitting in some kind of Space Queen-esq throne, looking trill as fuck.

Musically, this self-titled effort finds Clark walking the line of experimentalism while attempting to remain accessible and friendly to a casual listener, all while continuing to carve out and maintain her own identity, and even incorporating slight influences she may have picked up while collaborating with David Byrne in 2012. It’s a dense, multi-layered record, written to appear both incredibly personal and ambiguous at times; unhinged as well as restrained.

St. Vincent is not an immediate album—it takes a few songs to find its footing, and like pretty much all of Clark’s canon up to this point, it does warrant itself to multiple listens before a judgment is to be made. I really hate to use the term “grower” to describe something, but this is the kind of record that reveals itself over time.

It opens with “Rattlesnake,” a song about a nude walk in the desert that ends with Clark running back to safety after an encounter with—you guessed it—a rattlesnake. She follows that up with the frenetic lead single, “Birth In Reverse.” Much was made of that song’s opening line: “Oh what an ordinary day. Take out the garbage, masturbate.” In 2011, when interviewed by Pitchfork about Strange Mercy, she blushed when the topic of sex came up. Writer Amanda Petrusich questioned the lyric in “Surgeon”—“I spent the summer on my back”; a lyric that Clark claims was meant to be more about depression than anything else, but could see how it could be taken sexually. And now here, two years later, she’s checking out the desert naked, and tossing off a lyric about rubbing one out like it ain’t no thang, chalking it up as just another chore in a mundane American existence.

The record starts to take shape with the album’s third song, the rather somber “Prince Johnny,” a track that seems akin to other sad and slow jams in the St. Vincent canon: “The Party,” and “Strange Mercy” both come to mind immediately. And on St. Vincent, it’s the slightly less abrasive songs that work the best—the sweeping majesty Clark uses on the album’s closing track “Severed Crossed Fingers,” and the dope ass beats on “Huey Newton” are both standouts, as well as “I Prefer Your Love,” where she appears to be channeling some 80s Madonna vibes—specifically in her vocal performance on the refrain.

But that is not to say that the rest of the record fails to work. Far from it, actually.

Clark’s penchant for “oddball pop” music comprises a bulk of this self-titled affair. It’s very listenable, rather enjoyable, at times infectious, but the production (compressed and heavily effected guitars and drums run amok, as they almost always due with Clark’s music) as well as the faster tempos and aggressive tendencies could be slightly off putting to unprepared or uneducated listeners. 

As depicted in the cover art, as well as in the lengthy profile that Pitchfork ran recently, St. Vincent strives to announce Clark’s arrival is an “artist,” or at least drive that point home if you weren’t already picking up on it. But this doesn’t mean that she doesn’t take herself too seriously the entire time. There have always been slight bits of humor found in her songwriting—often buried rather deep. On “Regrets,” she gives a very obvious wink to what appears to be Queen-style classic rock guitar theatrics. And you know, with “Birth In Reverse,” there’s the whole masturbation thing.

The most straightforward song, lyrically speaking, on St. Vincent, is the latest single, “Digital Witness.” Musically, it took me a moment to realize how closely it resembles her track “Marrow,” from Actress. Here, Clark takes on the culture’s preoccupation with social networking and media over-saturation—“If I can’t show it, you can’t see me. What’s the point in doing anything?” she sings, a line that not so much comes off as someone who just doesn’t understand the times that we live in, but is meant to be a possible wake up call to the selfie obsessed, asking what ever happened to privacy?

Clark balances the dichotomy between “St. Vincent” the artist and “Annie Clark” the person relatively well on this record, but sometimes it is hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. On the loneliness and dysfunctionality depicted on “Prince Johnny,” both she and the titular protagonist pray to be made into a real boy and girl, respectively. It’s in this moment—incredibly heartbreaking to hear, actually—and in the commentary on the “fear of missing out” lifestyle of “Digital Witness” that kind of leaves you wondering what exactly it means to be living today, and what it means to be “real.” It’s big ideas like this that find no resolution here.

There are no real “clunkers” per se on St. Vincent, but there are songs that are slightly more successful and better executed when compared to others. Both “Rattlesnake” and “Psychopath” are songs where that David Byrne influence I mentioned earlier show up—and I can’t say it’s necessarily a good thing, but that doesn’t mean they are bad songs.

In early press material for the record, Clark said she wanted to make “a party record you play at a funeral.” I’d say whatever that even means, she’s done it. In all of the dope beats and keyboard fuckery, it’s easy to forget that Annie Clark’s main axe is the guitar, and god damn does she shred it—and no matter if these songs were good or bad, it’s still incredibly refreshing to hear a confident female artist doing something so fearless and original like this. She hasn’t exactly been moving away from guitar-driven music, but in the last three years, she has been really embracing a more futuristic sound that isn’t limited by six strings and whatever crunch and non-guitar sound effects pedals she can toss onto them.

Saying that St. Vincent certainly sounds like a St. Vincent record seems like I am selling it short. It doesn’t so much adopt the philosophy of if something’s not broken, don’t fix it; or, not trying to reinvent the wheel. Instead, it seems like a small step in the direction of something larger; a performer who is looking to really embody the “art” in “artist.”

St. Vincent arrives on Tuesday via Lomo Vista.