Annie Clark, the musician otherwise known as St. Vincent, projects an aura of eerie perfection-- beautiful, poised, good-humored, and well-adjusted to a degree uncommon for rock performers, let alone ordinary people. She's clearly not oblivious to her disarming qualities. On the covers of both her albums, her wide eyes and porcelain features give her the appearance of a cartoon princess come to life, and in the songs contained therein, she sings with the measured, patient tones of a benevolent, maternal authority figure. The thing that separates Clark from any number of earth mother Lilith Fair types, however, is her eagerness to subvert that effect. Her album covers may showcase her pretty face, but her blank expression and the tight framing leave the images feeling uncomfortably ambiguous. Her voice and arrangements are often mellow and soothing, but those sounds mainly serve as context as she exposes undercurrents of anxiety and discomfort hidden just beneath a gorgeous façade.
The songs on St. Vincent's second album, Actor, are primarily sung from the perspective of women who feel stifled and restless in their safe, orderly lives. Her characters worry about the judgment of neighbors and strangers, struggle with boredom and complacency, attempt to sublimate or defuse their anger, and, in one of the record's darkest selections, fantasize about disappearing completely into a new identity. Her lyrics are sympathetic observations rendered with clear, economical language focused on a specific moment of conflict or epiphany, occasionally undercut with self-deprecating asides and subtle humor. Even when the music is at its most dramatic, as when songs slip out of placid, Disney-esque string accompaniment into jagged, distorted guitar passages, Clark consistently understates her characters' angst, and buries their negative emotions under layers of denial, stoicism, and subservience to the desire of others.
The sound of the recordings depict the nuances of these deliberately muted emotions with uncanny accuracy, but the result is not overly polite or unaffecting. On the contrary, Clark's compositions hone in on precise fluctuations in mood, and flesh out complex inner worlds for the women suggested in her lyrics. At some points, as in the climax of "Black Rainbow" and the groovy, robotic hysteria of "Marrow", she achieves a harrowing expression of panic and desperation, but she does just as well in conveying the tension and pressures within less bombastic numbers such as "The Bed" and "Save Me From What I Want". The latter, which takes its title from one of artist Jenny Holzer's best-known aphorisms, is particularly successful in the way its faintest textural details communicate an unease at odds with its airy tone and steady beat.
Since Clark's voice seldom strays from a calm, lovely tone, her guitar parts articulate much of the record's anxieties and provide its moments of cathartic release. Her style is melodic and controlled, conjuring abrasive textures that nevertheless have a clean, meticulous quality that complements her immaculate arrangements as well as her characters' temperate demeanor. Despite a reliance on processed tonality, she manages to avoid a sterile coldness, and has a way of performing her most tightly composed hooks with a touch of looseness and immediacy. In her heaviest, most warped riffs, Clark finds the grace in her subjects' frustration and purges their fear and repressed anger with a glorious, singular noise.
In "Actor Out of Work", an atypically straightforward rock song early in the album's sequence, Clark uses the title phrase as a sad epithet for an inappropriate yet attractive suitor with an inability to lie convincingly. Acting, of course, is a lot more than just lying and pretending. It's about inhabiting characters, being able to fill in subtext with cadence and gesture, and having the empathy required to understand the motivations and actions of the person being portrayed. With that in mind, the album is perfectly titled, as Actor proves St. Vincent as an artist capable of crafting believable, complicated characters with compassion, insight, and exacting skill.
