Annie Clark is an enigma. Since she released her debut album as St. Vincent in 2007, the singer/guitarist has always been hard to pin down. Surely every one of her fans has been stumped on at least one occasion by the question, “what genre is she?” (The answer usually involves at least two hyphens.) Besides her musical identity, her state of mind seems to vary not just from song to song but from verse to chorus. There is probably no other contemporary artist who can at one moment woo an audience with lilting vocal melodies and at the next moment take a stage dive.
It came as a pleasant surprise, then, when, in a recent interview, Clark explained why she simply titled her fourth album “St. Vincent”: “I sound like myself on this record, so I just self-titled it.” Since her last solo album, 2011’s “Strange Mercy,” Clark has released both a full-length album and an EP in collaboration with professed St. Vincent fan, David Byrne. Despite the high stakes of that collaboration-that-dreams-are-made-of, it never succeeded in getting either artist out of their comfort zone, and the results were unmemorable. The music world is ready for a St. Vincent album where Clark doesn’t have to be anyone other than herself.
In truth, the stories that Clark tells with her music have always been deeply personal — it’s just sometimes hard to tell whether she’s talking about herself or someone else. And between the paranoid schizophrenic of “Actor Out of Work” and the chemically-sedated housewife of “Surgeon,” you sometimes hope that the songs aren’t about her. On her self-titled fourth album, Clark drops the personas that characterized her earlier work and sounds more candid than ever.
Opener “Rattlesnake” starts out with just a bouncing synthesizer accompanying Clark’s voice. As soon as she asks for the first time, “am I the only one in the only world?”, the band kicks into a syncopated groove that could have been played by Prince and the Revolution. The song builds tension as Clark grows increasingly anxious (“runnin’, runnin,’ no one will ever find me”) before launching into a molten guitar solo. There’s no time for a breather, though, as soon as “Rattlesnake” concludes, Clark counts off “Birth in Reverse” with clanging guitar chords. “Birth,” like much of the rest of the album, is fairly sparse — it’s got jagged riffs, jittery post-punk drums, and not much else. It’s a mode that we haven’t heard Clark (a master arranger) work in often, but it underscores the album’s no-nonsense attitude.
“St. Vincent” features some of Annie Clark’s most honest and contemplative songwriting. “Prince Johnny” is an intimate conversation with an old friend — one who’s anxious and unhappy, yet you don’t want to cast judgement on them. “I Prefer Your Love” is a heartfelt tribute to Clark’s mother, who recently overcame a serious illness, and “Severed Cross Fingers” is an honest portrayal of a relationship that you know you held on to for far too long (“I got hope, but my hope isn’t helping you”).
Elsewhere, Clark sounds absolutely fearless, like on the poised strut of “Every Tear Disappears”: “Oh, what about the pain? / Don’t ask me how, I just know that it fades.” The lyrics to “Huey Newton” are more esoteric, owing to the fact that Clark wrote them in an Ambien-induced haze during a late night on tour, but the fearlessness comes across in the music. The song begins with subdued R&B but, about halfway through, is transformed when Clark lays down a gut-wrenching, sludge-covered riff. Her yelping lead vocal — backed by an eerie choir of multitracked Annie Clarks — makes your hair stand on end.
“Digital Witness” will probably provoke cries of “David Byrne wannabe” because of its bizarre, minimalist music video, but it also bears similarities to contemporaries and fellow critical darlings Arcade Fire. Both those loveable Canadians’ “Reflektor” and St. Vincent’s “Digital Witness” feature lyrics that lament the lack of human interaction in an increasingly digital world. The similarities don’t stop there, though. Arcade Fire’s recently-released fourth album was also by far their least anxious and most fun. “Digital Witness” features one of the funkiest beats on any St. Vincent album, and it’s also highly functional: most kids at St. Vincent shows are probably gonna be too busy dancing to document the show with their iPhones.
Though most of “St. Vincent” is brimming with confidence, one of its most memorable moments is incredibly vulnerable, when, in the middle of “Regret,” Clark sings: “I’m afraid of heaven because I can’t stand the height / I’m afraid of you because I can’t be left behind.” A few seconds’ pause lets the anxiety linger, but she quickly interjects with “oh well! / there’s a red moon risin.’” She knows that her fear, whether it’s fear of failure or fear of success, is just fleeting. It’s that attitude that makes Annie Clark the reigning queen of her genre — whatever that genre is, anyway.
