During my first visit to New York City, I emerged from the subway near Lincoln Center—it was staging a John Adams opera—to find the intersection stilled. “Show’s over, folks, nothing to see here,” a police officer barked, waving his arms at dozens of people who disagreed; beyond him, somebody lay unmoving beneath an overturned van.
A block or so farther north, I walked past the musician St. Vincent, a.k.a. Annie Clark, who’d played up here only days before. I wanted to say “you were great in Toronto last week, Annie!” but a heat wave had begun since then: while she looked chic in a sundress and shades, I was a jorts-impaired apparition, shambling sweaty. So I let her and her friend move on towards another glancing encounter with death. Listening to the new St. Vincent album last week, also called St. Vincent, that afternoon seemed like a fluke example of her taste for jarring dissonance—stylish allure, in this music, being the weapon of choice as often as brute force.
Although she got her start in hippie choir the Polyphonic Spree, Clark has become one of the fiercest and most perverse-minded guitarists around. Even “Cruel,” the accessible lead single from 2011’s Strange Mercy, makes room for a solo with the timbre of sharpened rubber. Earlier that year, she got to shred unrelievedly on a renowned live coverof Big Black’s “Kerosene,” stiffened with ominous ennui. When she released the Record Store Day single “Krokodil”—guitars that sound like they were recorded inside an imperiled shipping container, distorted vocals mixed so low they only distinguish themselves as screaming (“shut up so I can think”), the rapacious chant “I need to bite”—it appeared to augur a whole LP of abrasive noise. That was just a very loud feint. The dreamy beauty that edges towards menace remains, but St. Vincent is the closest to pop music she’s ever sounded, a masterful student of the charts.
That sensibility was always present in her songwriting; “Marrow,” a highlight of Clark’s second album Actor, works its horn blurts and effects-laden guitar into distressed funk. What’s new is the sense of sheer ebullient momentum. “Cheerleader,” which has the big hook but comes off as a rhythmic cipher, now feels like a trial run. Describing the St. Vincent single “Digital Witness,” Katherine St Asaph wrote: “As much as the fustified brass recalls her David Byrne collaborations, it’s also a lot like the Bee Gees and, more to the point, all the ’10s hacks who wish they were Bee Gees … Those blase ‘yeahh’ interjections are Pop 101, as is the shimmery chorus.” One of those songs pondering the Internet/surveillance/media/etc., “Digital Witness” avoids the condescension of the previous Byrne/Clark joint “I Should Watch TV” while managing, unlike Arcade Fire’s “Reflektor,” to discern some comedy in its omnipresent subject. Its naivete is all fake.
