Annie Clark, who performs under the name St. Vincent, is a musician who arrived fully formed. Her début album, “Marry Me” (2007), showed her to be a nimble guitar player, an expert arranger of voices, and a collector of unidentifiable sounds. Her work lives at a distance from most rock or pop, owing to the contrast between her even, unshowy temperament and her taste for fertile clashes of language. (“You’re a supplement, you’re a salve. You’re a bandage, pull it off. I think I love you, I think I’m mad” is a lyric from the song “Actor Out of Work,” from 2009.) Her new album, “St. Vincent,” her fourth, is her simplest and most potent. It is odd but accessible, detailed though never ornamental, personal but stripped of narcissism.
In her past work, Clark played with the artificial and the imaginary; she has never been a particularly confessional songwriter. She has cited Disney soundtracks as inspiration, and she titled her second album “Actor.” “St. Vincent” feels like the first album direct enough to be self-titled; she might equally have called it “Annie Clark.” But, while the use of proxy characters is gone, her relish for proper dramatic staging is not. What before was drawn in subtle lines is now pressed into the surface with broad strokes. “St. Vincent” is Clark’s détente with rock. It offers emotionally transparent music that doesn’t sacrifice the pleasure of a performance that acknowledges that it is one.
Clark grew up in Dallas and, when she was fifteen, began going on tour with her aunt and uncle, a vaguely New Age jazz duo called Tuck & Patti. She performed with them only occasionally, but she watched, and wrote songs, and eventually attended Berklee College of Music, in Boston. (Rock musicians often apologize for or qualify the fact that they attended Berklee, possibly because they believe that too much technical skill interferes with the visceral mandate of rock. When we first met, Clark expressed a similar regret.) Soon after leaving school, Clark toured as a musician and singer with an ensemble group called the Polyphonic Spree, which had a large chorus and seemed to be forever rewriting “Jesus Christ Superstar.” Later, she played in Sufjan Stevens’s touring band.
“Marry Me” established her preference for the vivid over the familiar. The opening song, “Now, Now,” begins with two tracks of plucked guitar harmonics entwined like earrings and hair. A spare but violent drumbeat enters, and Clark begins a call-and-response with a children’s choir. The choir sings the first two words of each line, and Clark replies: “I’m not / your mother’s favorite dog, I’m not / the carpet you walk on, I’m not / one small atomic bomb, I’m not / anything at all.” The choir eventually repeats a circular phrase, as if in a schoolyard: “You don’t mean that, say you’re sorry.” At the distance of almost seven years, the song sounds even more like a mission statement—let’s get weird and stay there.
For three albums, Clark worked well in the Technicolor mode. Her vocals wandered upward, often into straight falsetto, with plenty of woodwinds and backing vocals filling the empty spaces. Her guitar playing was, and still is, a shank held in her pocket. She has a taste for effects pedals and is remarkably good at tucking melodies into rude vortices of sound. However elegantly and precisely she lays her table, she has an equivalent and opposite desire to break into room-clearing noise.
In 2011, Clark began collaborating with David Byrne; the result, the following year, was “Love This Giant.” Centered on the idea of using horns on almost every track, the album sounds uncannily as if it could be in the solo catalogue of either artist. At first, it appears to be dominated by Byrne, as his voice is so familiar, but the rich and loopy horn arrangements are so Clark-like that she pries it back. Walk out of the room, and the record begins to sound more like hers than like his.
In early 2013, after touring extensively for “Love This Giant,” Clark came back to New York, where she now lives, and quickly started writing. What she produced is both a break and a leap forward. Stylistically, the most notable changes are that she sings less often in her airy high voice, and that there is much more space around each instrument. Her singing is close in range to her speaking voice, which is deep in pitch. Her band pairs her with keyboards and drums. The sonic backdrops tend to be minor atmospheric disturbances that don’t distract from her voice and guitar. As Clark described them to me, the guitar and keyboard sounds are “primary colors”—thick, strong, bright. They hover in the low midrange area, giving the songs heft and unity rather than enormous, blinding sound.
The drum sounds on “St. Vincent” are swollen and often brutal, but they pivot quickly, helping create an audible frame: with the drums under her feet, the keyboards buzzing to one side, and her guitar flaring on the other, Clark has a wide space left for her voice. She wants you to hear these songs without a struggle.
The lyrics are plainer now, and backing vocals are comparatively rare. If Clark used to weave her experiences into words sung by a cast of characters, she now often just tells you what she’s been up to. Although being naked in the desert with a rattlesnake is the kind of dream imagery she would have used before, this time it comes from an experience. The repeated “running, running” and “sweating, sweating” lyric of “Rattlesnake” is not figurative but reported, from a trip out West.
Clark’s words revel in the everyday and the mundane. Garbage is taken out, someone masturbates, and people look at the world exclusively through a digital lens. The slow, devastating “I Prefer Your Love” emerged from watching her mother go through a serious illness. “Mother, won’t you open your arms and forgive me of all these bad thoughts, I’m blinded to the faces in the fog, but all the good in me is because of you, it’s true,” Clark sings, as close to a direct croon as she comes.
Last month, at the cavernous Terminal 5, on the far West Side of Manhattan, Clark gave a performance that was both solid and ecstatic. For the album cover (and for herself), she dyed her hair gunmetal gray, with a few chromatic streaks. Add her wide shoulders and the triangular planes of her face, and she looks exactly like the cult leader she apparently had in mind. Indeed, the album cover has her on a throne. Live, Clark substituted a three-tiered pyramid platform for the throne, which stood behind her as she sang center stage.
The crowd met the feeling of careful control with jubilation. Occasionally, in coördination with the keyboardist and guitarist Toko Yasuda, Clark doled out deliberate, short movements, shuffling her feet and gliding like a Roomba or bending an elbow precisely, like a robot factory arm looking to screw on a lid. During “I Prefer Your Love,” she draped herself over the tiered platform, deliberately rolling down—a burlesque routine slowed to a freeze-frame pace.
It would have taken an act of willing denial to miss the fact that, in an age where the guitar hero has become something of a rarity, a thirty-one-year-old woman was shredding. Clark’s solos are marvels of tone and feeling, eruptions that explode her beloved grids. For some of the younger people in the audience, Clark could have been the first woman they’d seen play a guitar solo. Watching gender bend in this way must have pleased Prince, who was at the show. Prince entered the mainstream by balancing sainthood, sin, and identity. Annie Clark, in her own small patch of the pop landscape, is close to redefining the rock star. Though she’s not Prince’s equal in impact or skill, she is doing a similar job of twisting the tools of pop to her own ends. ♦
