This is the second part of a three-essay exploration of the work of St. Vincent. Read the first part here.
For the first time, St. Vincent sounds like herself. “I was reading Miles Davis’ autobiography,” she told WNYC's Kurt Andersen, “and in it he talks about how the hardest thing for any musician to do is sound like yourself. And I thought, ‘You know what? I sound like myself on this record’, and so I just self-titled it”.
If that’s true, then St. Vincent, the one-woman guitar virtuoso and prodigious artpop phenom, sounds like a thumping, bleeding epic of seismic proportions.
Following her 2011 solo masterpiece Strange Mercy, a feat solidifying the artist’s elemental stature in the indie rock sphere, Annie Clark was conscripted by Talking Heads frontman and artistic pundit David Byrne, resulting in the 2012 release of Love This Giant. The ensuing collaboration, a rollicking, brass-driven expedition, celebrates the duo’s virtuosic intuition: the fusion of Byrne’s melodic electricity and Clark’s orating guitar savvy gives us the bouncing funk of “Weekend in the Dust” and the gyrating latitude of “I Should Watch TV”.
St. Vincent was written in the wake of Clark and Byrne’s joint tour, and the influence is evident. The eponymous crusade enmeshes St. Vincent’s unique capacity for storytelling with all the swagger and scope of Byrne’s imprint - the record clings to Clark’s traditions, but with a new kind of grandeur, exhibiting the quixotic pomp of a card-carrying performance artist. It marks an important extension in the St. Vincent Extended Universe: If Strange Mercy depicts “a repressed housewife on barbiturates and white wine”, then St. Vincent is the doctrine of a “near-future cult leader”. Its sonic profile is apocalyptic, exquisitely overbearing at times, a siren song beckoning its listener into Annie Clark’s new world.
St. Vincent announces its divergence instantly: the record’s opening track, “Rattlesnake”, ushers in a new era of St. Vincent with a jittery synth line and syncopated gasps, detailing Clark’s real-life naked encounter with the titular reptile: “Am I the only one in the only world?” In the first three minutes and thirty-four seconds of St. Vincent, the listener is taken by the hand and yanked into Annie Clark’s latest territory, fuzzy and strident in all of its splendor.
The record’s lead single, “Birth in Reverse” — perhaps one of Clark’s most ambitious musical forays as an artist — crashes in with delicious ear-splitting distortion and a commanding kick drum; the song is bleating and ceaseless, lavished in looping guitar lines and Clark’s signature Olympian vocal backflips.
“Digital Witness”, another promotional single, further bleeds Byrne’s influence, commanded by a catchy chorus of horns and an underlying ripping guitar. The song is entrancing, easily mistaken for a piece of dystopian propaganda but revealing a tongue-in-cheek skepticism for social media and the digital universe: “Digital witnesses / what’s the point of even sleeping? / if I can’t show it, if you can’t see me / what’s the point of doing anything?”
And if any track screams “near-future cult leader”, it’s “Bring Me Your Loves”, a haunting anthem with the beat of an authoritarian marching band, wherein the artist declares the title to the point of exhaustion: “Bring me your loves / all your loves, your loves / I wanna love ‘em too, you know”.
But among the ruin and rust of St. Vincent’s apocalypse, with all of its Psychopaths and Digital Witnesses, the record concludes with “Severed Crossed Fingers”, a suddenly sanguine ballad with a promise of hope. The title, plucked from Lonnie Moore’s novel Birds of America, stands as a testament to human resistance: “Spitting our guts from their gears / draining our spleen over years / find my severed crossed fingers in the rubble there”.
In my musings on Strange Mercy, I wrote of the kinship I’ve grown to feel toward “Cruel”, a piece lamenting human malice and its fallout: “They could take or leave you / so they took you / and they left you”. If “Cruel” is a tool of commiseration, a vessel for indignation, then “Severed Crossed Fingers” is a light at the end of the tunnel, a promise of the great human pliancy.
I think often of the state humanity has dragged itself into: innovation and destruction living side-by-side, the cruelty and the kindness and the cruelty that eclipses even the greatest kindnesses. Our world is not terribly far removed from St. Vincent’s “near-future cult”, a lifetime usurped by the digital and its depravity. I think of future generations, of today’s children who won’t recall the world before the incessant immersion of screen and sound and unwavering exposure. I think of where we came from - the state of modernization moves fast, too fast, and our bodies and brains are poorly equipped for the world we’ve designed around ourselves. We gorge ourselves on exhibition and temptation; we abandon our intuition in favor of endless consumption, perpetually poisoned by the promise of more. Never in the scope of human history have we had such resource at our fingertips — every headline, every image, every living identity encapsulated online — and it has turned torturous, a betrayal of our bodies and blood.
I say this not to lecture the reader; I’ve no doubt that we all possess the acute awareness of what such innovation has done to us, whether it lies dormant below the surface or besieges our waking hours. But lately, these realities feel overbearing, a haunting reminder of the dark side of human capacity, the willingness to destroy the lives of others for the gain of our own interests. Some are more culpable than others, but in truth, none of us are so far removed from this power. We’re selfish beings easily swayed by temptation; we follow the allure of greed, and we have everything we could ever want to distract ourselves from the guilt.
But among everything, we have no choice but to continue. The fear is overpowering - and so is our inherent resilience. We are wired for survival, the product of years of warring and working and evolving, growing into bodies and minds and spirits. We are armed with so much power, so much potential, so much promise: we are the ones with severed crossed fingers in the rubble there.
“Severed Crossed Fingers” is devoted to this resiliency; St. Vincent is an acute encapsulation of the human condition interrupted by the mutilation of the digital world. Through it all, we find a way to survive.
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Found you through Nikhil over at What’s Curation. I’m glad he recommended you, because I have a strong connection to a lot of the albums you’ve commented on so far. Looking forward to reading future issues!
excellent read.