The duvet of St Vincent’s earlier album, Daddy’s House, featured Annie Clark in character: heavy eye-make up, ripped stockings, blond wig – the “benzo magnificence queen” who haunted numerous songs.
Nicely, in fact it did. Clark as soon as launched an album referred to as Actor, and role-playing may be very a lot her factor: the prosthetics-heavy “grotesque beast” on the sleeve of her David Byrne collaboration, Love This Big; a “cult chief” for her eponymous 2014 album; the vertiginously heeled “dominatrix in a psychological asylum” of 2017’s Masseduction. However curiously, Daddy’s House additionally contained a tune that appeared to query the knowledge of adopting personae in any respect. “So, who am I attempting to be?” puzzled The Melting of the Solar, earlier than lauding a succession of confessional singer-songwriters: “Saint Joni” who wasn’t a “phony”, “courageous” Tori Amos, “proud” Nina Simone. “However me, I by no means cried,” it added, “to inform the reality, I lied.”
You may learn The Melting of the Solar in different methods – not least as a tune concerning the declining significance of pop music inside widespread tradition – however clearly the problem of selfhood has been bothering Clark. On Daddy’s House’s successor, she nonetheless trades in finely painted portraits of others, however she is now not utilizing an alter ego to color them. “I’m extra excited about that which is uncooked and important,” she not too long ago instructed an interviewer. What prompted this variation is an fascinating query, and the reply would possibly lie in the truth that All Born Screaming is thick with photographs of grief, each on the failure of relationships and at precise deaths. Reckless opens with its narrator watching somebody die, Sweetest Fruit with a meditation on the accident that killed producer Sophie three years in the past.
No matter her causes, Clark’s new curiosity within the “uncooked and important” performs out throughout All Born Screaming. As an alternative of a lavishly costumed persona, the album’s cowl options Clark on fireplace, and the songs are full of people that – as she maybe does – really feel caught between actuality and the way they’re perceived. The title observe talks a few “pantomime of a contemporary woman”. The protagonist of Flea lavishes consideration and cash on their object of their affections, however confesses: “Have a look at you and all I see is meat.” The narrator of Damaged Man, in the meantime, swaggers lubriciously alongside, with music to match – the bursts of backing vocals nod within the route of Prince’s Kiss – earlier than the facade collapses and so they’re revealed as wounded, determined and “cracking up”, with music to match: jolting bursts of distorted guitar, so loud they virtually obliterate every little thing else on the observe.
You may take single Huge Time Nothing as a touch upon the dangerous religion and falsity of life on-line – “don’t present, don’t flake, go onerous, debase” – however no matter it’s about, it leaves the narrator hole: “I look inside / Nothing.” Even the end-of-days state of affairs conjured at size on The Energy’s Out, full with a solid who appear to have arrived direct from David Bowie’s equally apocalyptic 5 Years, seems to be not because it appeared: “That’s why I by no means got here house,” it ends, as if the apocalypse was only a notably extravagant excuse pitched to a suspicious companion.
Clark has described the music as “a pummelling” – her thrilling guitar enjoying is at its most distorted and spiky all through – and stated its sound, a world away from Daddy’s House’s queasy 70s rock homages, is influenced by the music of her teenagers, together with Tori Amos and 9 Inch Nails. You may also add grunge. There’s a plethora of quiet-loud lurches in dynamics, and Dave Grohl performs drums on Flea and Damaged Man. The latter tune’s conclusion quotes Mudhoney’s In ’n’ Out of Grace, both intentionally or coincidentally.
That stated, the music on All Born Screaming is just too stressed and full of concepts to rely as 90s revivialism. You’re equally prone to encounter a sudden burst of sentimental rock, some Zapp-ish electro-funk, a neatly achieved exploration of reggae’s bizarre sense of house or an epic Baba O’Riley synth arpeggio as you’re a thunderous industrial rhythm. Nothing stays in a single place for lengthy, together with Clark’s voice, which shifts from a spectral presence that mushes phrases into incomprehensibility on opener Hell Is Close to to virtually painfully in-your-face on Reckless.
What ties all of it collectively is her superbly honed ability as a songwriter. For all of the sonic uproar, the melodies are inconceivable to overlook, and so is the persona she imprints throughout the album: troubled however self-aware, wryly humorous, the doubts and fears and worries she expresses fully at odds with the arrogance of her strategy to risk-taking, shape-shifting music. “The sweetest fruit is on the limb,” she sings at one juncture, a degree underlined by All Born Screaming’s left flip.
This week Alexis listened to
Pet Store Boys – A New Bohemia
The standout from what sounds suspiciously like the most effective PSB album in years: 90s nostalgia set to strings and a stunning, sweetly melancholy tune.
