[Reaper16]

03. St. Vincent – St. Vincent


A fittingly self-titled album, as Annie Clark synthesizes many aspects of her St. Vincent sound here. Strange melodies like choral music from another planet jut up against her trademark weird as Hell guitar licks. She can totally shred, but her playing sounds effortless & composed rather than most guitar virtuosos with their strained solo faces and vibes of extemporaneous effort. Like the main lick anchoring the heavy “Bring Me Your Loves” – it’s some fretboard & whammy bar wizardry that she plays like a robot who has mastered the instrument. Maybe she IS; I dunno. That song also demonstrates this album’s central catchiness. There’s a pop vein running though this whole album. Whereas some of the song’s on her previous album, Strange Mercy, kept you at a distance with their structures, Clark embraces more traditional structures here while not losing any weirdness in the instrumentation. Her recent collaborative work with David Byrne is evident in this kind of pop sensibility, perhaps most in lead single “Birth In Reverse,” which is an oddball, horn-driven earworm about social media dissatisfaction. By the time final track “Severed Crossed Fingers,” a song that vintage David Bowie could be proud of, ends you are ready to play the album again immediately. It’s instantly accessible and contains enough nuance to hold up over a whole lot of repeated listens.