Send "St. Vincent " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 Directed by French New Wave great Éric Rohmer, 1972's Chloe in the Afternoon tells of a man caught between fidelity and a stylish old friend named Chloe, who usually pops up at his office after lunch. But just when it looks like the two are going to consummate their affair, the husband is struck with a crisis of conscience and runs back home to his wife. The opening track on Annie Clark's third album as St. Vincent is also called "Chloe in the Afternoon", and while Clark has acknowledged the influence of Rohmer's film on the song, she takes the story to a darker, more dominatrix-y place. In her telling, Chloe carries a "black lacquered horse-hair whip," and, presumably, is paid to use it on white-collar exhibitionists looking for a sadistic tea-time fix. Clark's monstrously corroded guitar riff stands in for the bruised skin and wincing faces; it's hard to tell if she's singing as the person wearing heels or the person being stepped on with them, and that's most definitely the point.Across three albums, the Dallas native has become a master of subverting her picture-perfectness with violence, rage, and mystery-- "I'll make you sorry," sang Clark in creepy lullaby tones on the very first song on her debut album. The juxtaposition is naturally intriguing, a sophisticated twist on finding out that the horror-movie killer was actually the girl next door all along. "Physically, I'm a very demure-looking person," Clark said in a recent Pitchfork interview, "but I certainly have as much aggression or anger as the next person, and that's got to come out somehow." On her fine, art-rocking debut, Marry Me, those feelings of hurt, loss, and bloodlust could translate a tad cutesy. (On new track "Cheerleader", the lines, "I've played dumb when I knew better/ Tried too hard just to be clever," sound more self-consciously frank than usual.) Follow-up Actor found Clark over-embellishing at times, adding superfluous strings and flutes that often muddied her message. But Clark's recent live Big Black covers saw her taking the pretty/ugly contrast to raw new levels: "I think I fucked your girlfriend once, maybe twice," she sang, fervently, on "Bad Penny", "I fucked all your friends' girlfriends-- now they hate you!" And anyone who's seen the Berklee dropout do her seizured duckwalk in concert while soloing on unhinged tracks like "Your Lips Are Red" knows her not-so-secret weapon is a lurching guitar style somewhere between Robert Fripp's sheet-metal prog and Tom Morello's 10-ton riffage. On Strange Mercy, she ditches Marry Me's naivety and Actor's ostentatious arrangements, boosts the inventive guitar playing, and ends up with her most potent and cathartic release yet....full text |
| Guardian |
| "You're all legs, I'm all nerves," is an arresting way to start an album, but Strange Mercy's opener, Chloe in the Afternoon, is about the healing powers of S&M, all whips and black lacquer, so it sets the tone perfectly. Annie Clark's third record as St Vincent is clammy with sex, its characters swooning their way through a series of encounters and regrets, from Cheerleader's reluctant object of desire to Surgeon's woozy declaration: "I spent the summer on my back." It's wonderfully at odds with the naivety of the fairytale strings and Clark's choirgirl vocals, conjuring up a hazy world in which nothing seems quite stable, a state helped along by the addition of magnificently oddball heavy riffs and stuttering synths. It's a little top-heavy, and meanders towards the end, but it's smart, demanding and unique, too....full text |
| Tinymixtapes |
| The cover for St. Vincent’s Strange Mercy depicts a muffled mouth that’s probably being suffocated, a playfully dark illustration of the new album’s title. It’s also the first St. Vincent cover that isn’t a straight-up headshot of frontwoman Annie Clark, perhaps a strange kind of mercy itself. Read through a couple reviews of her previous albums, and you’re sure to find a critic or 12 fervently analyzing Clark’s photos gracing her debut Marry Me and, especially, her sophomore album, Actress. Musicians slap mug shots on albums all the time, and formally, Clark’s have been pretty unremarkable: her face, solid background, inscrutable expression. Meanwhile, what’s remarkable about the pictures — why they were likely analyzed in the first place — is elided, since it’s not an appropriate subject for critical analysis: Annie Clark is ridiculously good looking. Problematizing beauty and our response to it has been one of St. Vincent’s most defining features and most successful endeavors. A lot of artists have tried to expand the definition of beauty beyond its normal boundaries, revealing the beautiful in the nontraditional, the subaltern, and the unaesthetic. Clark, on the other hand, seems more concerned with expanding the expressive range of the traditionally pretty, narrowly defined as her neck. In performances and videos, she carries her delicate good looks with passivity that’s both unnerving and deliberate, accompanied by a stare so exaggeratedly blank it threatens to turn feminist theory on “the gaze” inside out. Likewise, the compositions on her first two albums used the common sounds and tropes that we’ve come to associate with unchallenging audio pleasure, which, for the most part, they give us — yet that pleasure’s usually accompanied by a sense of uneasiness, dread, or at least discordantly cerebral constructions. All of that required control, detachment, and self-consciousness. St. Vincent was posing. So it’s no paradox that, with her face covered up, Clark’s delivered her most sincere album. According to Clark, she initially fleshed out this album’s batch of songs on her guitar — a reversal from her usual process of learning how to approximate a track live after it had been pieced together in the studio or on her laptop. The orchestral pop flourishes that dominated her previous work are noticeably infrequent, leaving more room for Clark’s unshowily overachieving — or in the case of lead single “Surgeon,” flauntingly confident — guitar work (which should be fun to see live). Clark and co-producer John Congleton have added layers, weird (but not too weird) textures, and manipulated most of the tracks’ sounds nearly to the point — but not quite — of overproduction, but Strange Mercy still has more room to breathe than any St. Vincent album. Compared to Clark’s previous work, “Champagne Year” sounds nearly a cappella, even though her voice is backed by what sounds like The Postal Service on quaaludes. For all its concrete sonic departures from St. Vincent’s previous work, Strange Mercy’s most noticeable change is hard to pin down: you can’t hear a smirk. These songs may or may not be written from the perspective of characters; if they are, though, they’re delivered with more empathy and less winking analytical detachment than on Actress. Maybe it’s her new songwriting process, the immediacy and physicality of her hands on the strings. Instead of musically undercutting her lyrics, the music now mostly complements them. On “Surgeon,” when Clark sings “best finest surgeon/ come cut me open,” her guitar breaks into an equally suggestive staccato riff, a pointillist porno-funk. The title track, about a “little one” who’s been “tired for a long, long time,” has sympathetically slow strums, hushed at one point to what’s almost a plucked variation on “Claire de Lune.” A second later, the riff turns aggressively crunch when Clark sings, “If I ever meet/ The dirty policeman/ Who roughed you up/ I… I don’t know what.”...full text |
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