Directed by French New Wave great Éric Rohmer, 1972's Chloe in the Afternoon tells of a man caught between fidelity and a stylish old friend named Chloe, who usually pops up at his office after lunch. But just when it looks like the two are going to consummate their affair, the husband is struck with a crisis of conscience and runs back home to his wife. The opening track on Annie Clark's third album as St. Vincent is also called "Chloe in the Afternoon", and while Clark has acknowledged the influence of Rohmer's film on the song, she takes the story to a darker, more dominatrix-y place. In her telling, Chloe carries a "black lacquered horse-hair whip," and, presumably, is paid to use it on white-collar exhibitionists looking for a sadistic tea-time fix. Clark's monstrously corroded guitar riff stands in for the bruised skin and wincing faces; it's hard to tell if she's singing as the person wearing heels or the person being stepped on with them, and that's most definitely the point.
Across three albums, the Dallas native has become a master of subverting her picture-perfectness with violence, rage, and mystery-- "I'll make you sorry," sang Clark in creepy lullaby tones on the very first song on her debut album. The juxtaposition is naturally intriguing, a sophisticated twist on finding out that the horror-movie killer was actually the girl next door all along. "Physically, I'm a very demure-looking person," Clark said in a recent Pitchfork interview, "but I certainly have as much aggression or anger as the next person, and that's got to come out somehow." On her fine, art-rocking debut, Marry Me, those feelings of hurt, loss, and bloodlust could translate a tad cutesy. (On new track "Cheerleader", the lines, "I've played dumb when I knew better/ Tried too hard just to be clever," sound more self-consciously frank than usual.) Follow-up Actor found Clark over-embellishing at times, adding superfluous strings and flutes that often muddied her message.
But Clark's recent live Big Black covers saw her taking the pretty/ugly contrast to raw new levels: "I think I fucked your girlfriend once, maybe twice," she sang, fervently, on "Bad Penny", "I fucked all your friends' girlfriends-- now they hate you!" And anyone who's seen the Berklee dropout do her seizured duckwalk in concert while soloing on unhinged tracks like "Your Lips Are Red" knows her not-so-secret weapon is a lurching guitar style somewhere between Robert Fripp's sheet-metal prog and Tom Morello's 10-ton riffage. On Strange Mercy, she ditches Marry Me's naivety and Actor's ostentatious arrangements, boosts the inventive guitar playing, and ends up with her most potent and cathartic release yet.
Some tracks build like a hot kettle, puffing out ragged smoke in the form of instrumental curlicues. "Surgeon" finds Clark zonked, despondent, paralyzed. "Turn off the TV, wade in bed, a blue and a red, a little something to get along," she sings, "best, finest surgeon, come cut me open." And soon enough, the song revives itself with a bursting synth freak-out courtesy of gospel keyboardist Bobby Sparks. "Cheerleader" breaks on its enormous hook, with Clark singing, "I, I, I, I, I don't wanna be a cheerleader no more," each "I" pounding down hard, emphatically stating its independence. And it's Clark's manic guitar-- sounding like exploding radio static-- that cuts through a relationship's indecisive fickleness on "Northern Lights". On that song, she sings, "Gotta get young fast gotta get young quick/ Gotta make this last if it makes me sick," and the topic of aging and lost youth is brought up several times on the album.
At 28, Clark seems to be sorting through her own existential artistic dilemmas. A champagne year is supposed to be celebrated when you turn the same age as the day you were born, but "Champagne Year" finds the singer-- born September 28, 1982-- in a decidedly non-bottle-popping mood. Her voice takes on a gorgeous creak on the nebulous ballad, as she sings, "I make a living telling people what they wanna hear/ It's not a killing but it's enough to keep the cobwebs clear." An almost-30 indie musician's lament? Perhaps. Meanwhile, the galloping "Hysterical Strength" employs some magical thinking while dealing with death. When Clark isn't bulldozing through time and space with her fretwork, she's contemplating her place with care. The balance is something to behold.
While Strange Mercy's more propulsive workouts-- including the single "Cruel", Clark's purest pop song to date-- are quick to snag attention, the slow burners hit just as heavily. The playful "Dilettante" combines the mutant funk of David Bowie's "Fashion" with the understated genius of D'Angelo's Voodoo, and has Clark possibly propositioning a prophet: "Oh, Elijah, don't make me wait/ What is so pressing that you can't undress me, anyway?" Closer "Year of the Tiger" is a stark summation of end-times capitalism in a recession-stuck United States. Sounding like a Wall Street swindler, she slithers, "Italian shoes like these rubes know the difference/ Suitcase of cash in the back of my stick-shift... Oh America, can I owe you one?" And the delicate title track involves a child, a father stuck behind prison glass, and a breaking point in the form of a refrain: "If I ever meet the dirty policeman who roughed you up, no I don't know what." Her threat here is not a gimmick or a subversion; it's irrational, confused, and real.
Specific names (Chloe, Elijah) and times ("Year of the Tiger", "Champagne Year") give the sense that Strange Mercy exists in its own universe. As does its music, which skips through art-rock touchstones from Talking Heads to Kate Bush to Peter Gabriel without relinquishing a bit of its originality. After all, those artists were trying to create new sounds, an ever-more-difficult task in a culture steeped in its own detritus. Here, Clark's role-playing is grounded in emotions that are as cryptic as they are genuine and affecting. And when her voice can't bear it, her guitar does the screaming.
