St. Vincent gets called “the female Bowie.” Not always for her music, which has taken off from steady and skillful to expansive and gripping at exponential speed; not for her tributes and eulogies of the man, nor exactly for her gender-tweaking image. No, among the first hits for “female Bowie” is a British tabloid, sweeping her and model and ex-girlfriend Cara Delevingne into a world of “domestic bliss” and “purple loo outfit[s].” Such is the life of a woman whose artistry has been made into snackable content. But torn-from-the-headlines reductiveness aside, over the past decade there really hasn’t been a better candidate for the new anything-Bowie than Annie Clark.
Masseduction, then, is her Let’s Dance: exploding the comparatively unassuming craft of Marry Me and the comparatively tentative rhythms of her self-titled album into immediate hooks with a roaring largesse. The guitars are background squalls, compressed and oiled up with “Gary Glitter tuning.” Kendrick Lamar beatmaker Sounwave contributes. So does Jack Antonoff—who’s helped turn the stories of Lorde and Taylor Swift into technicolor memoirs—and even Delevingne herself on backing vox. All of which, in 2017, looks an awful lot like a pop album.
There’s a certain path that former cult artists, or at least non-megastars, take when inspiration or finances move their career pop-wards. The album will be meta, pop-about-pop: smart and layered at best, self-conscious or defensive at worst. The rollout will be a multi-platform extravaganza, where fake takes and alternate poppier personalities abound. Masseduction certainly has that. “We wanted pop-level intention,” said creative director Willo Peron, and Clark delivered: listening sessions styled as escape room puzzles, an art campaign in vinyl-bright pink and red, the fetish boots-and-catsuits in the style of (and on the lower half of) artist and album-cover model Carlotta Kohl; gimmicky Instagram interviews scripted by Carrie Brownstein. The interview questions were absurd placeholders standing in for the ubiquitous, rote questions musicians constantly field—the banal (“insert light banter”), the softballs (what would you tell aspiring musicians?) and the exhausting and gendered: what it’s like to play a show in heels? What it’s like being a woman in music? The punchline to this is pure undiluted acid. The acid’s seeped into the music, too; Masseduction isn’t a pop album so much as a deeply, admittedly personal communique with a pop veneer.
“Sugarboy” executes this with aplomb, via the synthy production, slinky vocals, the call-and-response “Boys! Girls!” and the Swiftian line, “Got a crush on tragedy,” but it’s all played at a deliberately-too-manic pace, too fast to strut. Clark addresses her fans through gritted teeth, guttural voice, and alarming bluntness: “I am alone like you,” less a star’s smile than a rictus grin. “Fear the Future” echoes Marry Me’s “The Apocalypse Song” in its love metaphor, “little death” at the time of the big death, except this time, plays it bigger, more cavernous, turning the restraint of “The Apocalypse Song” into Michael Bay’s Armageddon. The percussion cracks like tectonic plates, the guitars like shuddering reverberations. It almost sounds like a Sleigh Bells track, except where they’d be goofy or cutesy, Clark is deadly serious. The catchiest song, with the most rock-star title and most tabloid-baiting content, is “Young Lover”—one about an overdose, but played with complexity. She leaves in the worst thoughts, putting the most yearning love-song lyrics in the place they accomplish the least. It’s no new trick to make one’s poppiest songs one’s saddest, largely because it works: despair as a neon marquee.
Clark has achieved rockstar grandeur, as well as rock stars’ greatest musical vice: unsubtle commentary on the problems of today. Undoubtedly, there are things left to say about Los Angeles, but while Clark describes the city in great turns of phrase like “the mothers milk their young,” the verses are the same story: sun, sleaze, stars. Just by reading the title “Pills,” you’re already at the finish line, having anticipated its nursery-rhyme, advertising-jingle setting after the first few seconds. But it’s not just social commentary—she’s said as much—it’s also a snapshot of a year in a life, medicated into a blur. “Los Ageless” isn’t about the city so much as Clark’s fleeing it. The most LA thing about it may be the cinematic-noir chorus Clark inhabits—“How can anybody have you and lose you and not lose their minds, too?” On the other coast, in “New York,” she inhabits a stage ballad: the beat haunted by a muffled pulse, the kind that could burst awake at any moment but won’t, and the lyrics haunted by the ghosts of old swagger and surety. “You’re the only motherfucker in the city who can stand me,” she says, speaking in the present, talking about the past.
Masseduction often feels fragmentary, like two or three albums in the campaign of one. It’s part industry mundanity—“Slow Disco” sounds nothing like the rest of the album because it was written with and for Joy Williams of the folk-rockers the Civil Wars—but it fits the narrative: a few years unmoored in the land of sex, drugs, and pop. “Savior” is like porno-funk played by an utterly bemused band. Clark recounts the sexual un-imagination of American history as told through sexy Halloween costumes—nurses, teachers, nuns and cops in their respective ill-fitting clothes, in the garb of dominatrices and the guise of the powerful, but the mindset of the alienated. If St. Vincent was Clark’s Lorrie Moore album (“I ripped [Moore] off so much on the last album, I’m surprised she didn’t, like….” she said at a promo event), this is her Mary Gaitskill song, where she echoes her protagonists’ exhaustion at the sexual personalities and dialogue they’re given, all roles and no play.
Compare this to the title track’s hyperspecific and very un-mass figures of seduction. Clark mentions Charles Mingus’ The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, Nick Cave’s The Boatman’s Call, a nihilist and a “punk rock romantic,” prodigal Christians and their “paranoid secretions fallin’ on basement rugs,” recounted gleefully, as if shining a blacklight on them. You won’t see these figures in costumes because their common threads are exploitation—(the punk is passed out on the floor, the nun’s in the torture-pose “stress position,” Lolita is herself)—and sadness. The Boatman’s Call was recorded after parts of Cave’s life collapsed, and sounds it, and Mingus’ liner notes, co-written by his psychologist, exhume its despair: “If I heard his music I'd understand.” You’d understand by hearing the chorus of “Savior,” too: one word, a simple “Please,” drawn out, syllable by syllable, every shade of longing and real connection unspoken but apparent. Even it’s a little fraught—at the end, Clark’s refrain is buried in the mix, hard to say whether it’s intimate or rueful.
This is the sadder core of Masseduction. Everyone, including Clark, has been left or is leaving and looking back at what used to be a connection. The only constant is the void—“back and unblinking,” Clark admits. On “Happy Birthday, Johnny,” the man of 2014’s “Prince Johnny” and 2007’s “Marry Me” is adrift and estranged somewhere; the ballad is both achingly personal, centering on possibly-real dialogue (“Annie, how could you do this to me?”) and painstakingly crafted—maybe, it seems, if she worded it perfectly, it wouldn’t have to be a eulogy. It all ends with a mournful cabaret titled “Smoking Section”—a little like if “Happy Together” were scraped hollower and hollower from the inside. Clark imagines increasingly baroque deaths for herself: not suicidal, exactly, more the feeling that if death were to be suddenly provided, through some freak faultless accident, it’d be fine. “It’s not the end,” Clark sings, one last ragged thread of resilience. The unspoken subtext is that for Clark it still feels like a beginning.
