St. Vincent has described her fourth solo record as party music that you
would throw on at a funeral. There’s a definite spooked quality to her
music, and it’s a bit more in focus on the new album. The singer, who
formerly backed Sufjan Stevens, is now sporting a shock of white hair,
like she’d recently been electrocuted and is presenting herself as a
changed woman on the album’s cover for everyone to wonder what the
heck’s going on.
On her last album Strange Mercy, Annie Clark sang about spending “the summer on
my back,” making you wonder if she talking about being bedridden with
depression or just getting laid a lot. On her latest self-titled album, there’s more suggestive and devastating one liners, synths, and fuzzed
out guitar shredding, but this time her songs exhibit more
electronic-based rhythms.
The album reminds me of the dinner party scene in the movie Beetlejuice, exhibiting moments of elegance, and zany, scatterbrain
behaviors mixed in with an almost emotionally-absent appeal that’s hard
to pin down. Her music sounds like Manhattan to me, busy but alone;
something you can disappear into.
“Oh what an ordinary day, take out the garbage masturbate,” she
starts on “Birth in Reverse.” Other lines, like “No one around so I take
off my clothes” on “Rattlesnake,” are more direct references, like the
time she stripped naked on a friend’s ranch in Texas only to be freaked
out by a snake.
But the standout song here is “Prince Johnny,” an overture to a male
acquaintance with vague references to snorting drugs. “Remember the
time went and snorted the piece of the Berlin Wall that you’d extorted,”
and “You traced the Andes with your index.” A man who prays to bathroom
stalls, and keeps similar company, she sings.
Clark also flirts with a more wider appeal, exhibiting Madonna circa
“Like a Prayer” or “Erotica” with songs like “Bring Me Your Loves,”
which may be the catchiest and forward hook she’s written yet.
Other
songs, like “I Prefer Your Love to Jesus,” seem like trite and obvious
statements these days, but Clark sings in earnest and with grandeur.
Grade: B
