CD review: St Vincent

Annie Clark, of St Vincent, seems determined to work against the grain. Her collaboration with David Byrne, of Talking Heads, on the album Love This Giant, in 2012, did little to convince her of the folly of her ways. For this, we must be grateful: Clark is a dying breed, a songwriter more concerned with self-expression than with penning a chart single.

St Vincent is Clark’s fourth album, and confirms she is a bona fide artist. Not only does she write and arrange her songs, but she performs an array of instruments, from electric guitar to trumpets and the clarinet. Her influences are varied — everything from pop to chamber music and free jazz — but she puts her own stamp on proceedings.

Few contemporary albums engage so movingly with the modern world. Clark’s observations, like Byrne’s, focus on the sad little dramas that play out in living-rooms and offices. “People turn the TV on, it looks just like a window,” she sings on ‘Digital Witness’. “What’s the point in even sleeping/If I can’t show, if you can’t see me?”

At times, the quirkiness is just on the right side of irritating. ‘Bring Me Your Lovers’ opens with a riff designed to test one’s patience, before settling into a more compelling groove. If the guitar solo is obsolete, one wonders how far Clark can take the synth-noodling she employs to fill in the musical spaces and the outro. So far, she has kept a firm grasp on good taste.

The most immediate track on the album is ‘Psychopath’, whose narrator seems to be having a panic attack, “running down the highway with all the flames and fury at my back.” If that seems unsettling, consider ‘Severed Crossed Fingers’, which describes the tedium of touring and a performer’s terror of aging: “Wake up puddle-eyed, sleeping in the suit/The truth is ugly, well I feel ugly too.”

There will be more successful albums from American artists this year, but few will be as challenging as St Vincent’s. She belongs to a sub-genre of independent spirits that includes Byrne, and Laurie Anderson, artists for whom pushing the envelope is less a matter of commercial nous that one of creative necessity.