Send "St. Vincent " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Sputnikmusic |
 Since Annie Clark is such a one for contradictions, how about this one? Strange Mercy is, at the same time, her most shocking and most unsurprising record. I mean, it’s like she put the thing through a blender, but of course it’s like she put it through a blender. Who are we talking about? This is St. Vincent’s career, which has thus far has developed into a glowing success without daring adhere to the normal structure of indie pop. It’s much more sinister than that- Actor, as she put it herself, was influenced by fairy tales, but only in the wholly ***ed-up, completely backwards Hans Christian Andersen way that fairy tales get told. That’s what made “Black Rainbow” sound as if she was travelling the Yellow Brick Road backwards, arriving at the hurricane for her final scene. So yes, it’s shocking to hear her send the structure of a song a little awol, to watch as she twists a purdy scene into a terrifying one (“What Me Worry,” my goodness), but don’t tell me you aren’t waiting for Strange Mercy to hit that sludgy, disastrous moment.I guess St. Vincent likes the little disasters as much as we do. I found myself doing a fair amount of eye-rolling the first time I played Strange Mercy, because you’re not waiting for long. In fact, Strange Mercy self-destructs within seconds; “Chloe In the Afternoon” is deliberately off-centre, its swampy guitar work giving more texture than melody (that’s a guitar?!) and Clark flat-out refusing to resolve her voice with the song’s rhythm, putting her words a literal second or two early, or maybe late. It’s hard to tell when the song ends sounding so completely whole. You can be just as well astonished by the same trick played on “Northern Lights,” where she pulls back the song, ready to thrust into full gear, for a kind of non-solo in which her guitar simply circulates a disgusting noise for a little while before releasing the song for a climax played straight. It’s one of those on-paper things, really: these little noises should be nothing more than plain ugly diversions from otherwise irresistible pop songs, but thrown into the middle of a song as simple as “Northern Lights,” doesn’t that sludgy patch sound sort of assured? It’s like a signature, that squiggly, atonal moment of nothing, whether it stands out as surreally as it does here, or whether it marks the heavy chorus of “Cheerleader.” Even if Strange Mercy is like a blender with its top blown off, it’s undeniable how convincing St. Vincent has become. Actor was produced to be almost suffocating, and as a result had songs that felt compressed in sound and time. Her third record feels like an attempt to remould Actor with all the space in the world. It continues to merge together two atmospheres, one eerie and the other distinctly vintage, and as a result songs like “Surgeon” ooze with the confidence of a musician who knows her own game. The intro of “Surgeon” echoes Nancy Sinatra’s ‘60s Bond tune, “You Only Live Twice,” but is only there long enough for the song to become too warped for this pleasant nostalgia (“best find a surgeon / come cut me open”). It's a testament to Clark's songwriting skills how we are forced to note both of these atmospheres colliding....full text |
| Guardian |
| Texan Annie Clark's third album is a departure of sorts from 2007's Marry Me and 2009's Actor. The strings and woodwind have been turned down in favour of a harder sound, dominated by off-kilter drums and queasy synths, with Clark's electric guitar filling the gaps with intricate runs, riffs and fills. The modulations and switches in pace remain as bold as ever, and Clark has a knack for memorable melody and a winning voice with shades of Kate Bush and Leslie Feist. I like the chorus of "Cheerleader", the synth-pop feel of "Cruel" and the way in which tracks such as "Surgeon" and "Neutered Fruit" build to fierce intensity....full text |
| 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. Some tracks build like a hot kettle, puffing out ragged smoke in the form of instrumental curlicues. "Surgeon" finds Clark zonked, despondent, paralyzed. "Turn off the TV, wade in bed, a blue and a red, a little something to get along," she sings, "best, finest surgeon, come cut me open." And soon enough, the song revives itself with a bursting synth freak-out courtesy of gospel keyboardist Bobby Sparks. "Cheerleader" breaks on its enormous hook, with Clark singing, "I, I, I, I, I don't wanna be a cheerleader no more," each "I" pounding down hard, emphatically stating its independence. And it's Clark's manic guitar-- sounding like exploding radio static-- that cuts through a relationship's indecisive fickleness on "Northern Lights". On that song, she sings, "Gotta get young fast gotta get young quick/ Gotta make this last if it makes me sick," and the topic of aging and lost youth is brought up several times on the album....full text |
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