The acoustic album is a rite of passage. It marks a period when the tour, the band, and the press has left an artist yearning to be seen in a soft new light: For Nirvana, their MTV Unplugged performance was a middle finger to the hype machine—one of the biggest, loudest rock bands on earth settling in for some quiet covers and deep cuts. Mariah Carey’s 1992 acoustic EP set out to disprove naysayers who claimed her lack of touring equated to lack of talent. For St. Vincent, whose promotional circuit for 2017’s Masseduction featured latex accessories, pop-up art galleries, and interviews given from inside a hot-pink cube, an intimate, no-frills album is a welcome antidote to a career defined by cult and concept.
Masseduction used locomotive synths and schoolyard call-and-responses to project an image of manic sensuality, while Annie Clark took on the public persona of “dominatrix at the mental institution.” It was a vision that deferred and distracted from questions of a more personal nature, perhaps a defense mechanism following her whirlwind year in the spotlight with her relationship with model and actress Cara Delevingne. But behind all the leopard print and leather, the record was a romantic opus filled with simple melodrama: “You and me, we’re not meant for this world,” she sang on “Hang on Me,” as if starring in her own John Hughes movie.
Recorded over two days at Manhattan’s Reservoir Studios studios, MassEducation strips its hypersexual, neon-clad predecessor for parts, exposing its songs as tales of longing and nostalgia. Clark seemed to always know that her record contained two lives: “This needs to be something people can really dance to,” she said of a song on her last album, “until they listen to the words and then they’re crying.” Hiding melancholy behind pop production is nothing new, but on an album so saturated with sadness, these pared-down renderings give Clark a chance to indulge in their underlying sentiments.
Accompanied by longtime friend Thomas Bartlett (a frequent producer for Sufjan Stevens) on the piano, Clark’s voice expands and contracts, varyingly snarky and flat, honeyed and affectionate, husky and sensual. On “Slow Disco,” her voice wells up, rich and velvetine, as she muses, “Am I thinking what everybody’s thinking?” On an earlier club remix of the same track, dubbed “Fast Slow Disco,” the line is more of a wink towards promiscuity. Here, the same lyrics come off as a desperate cry for connection. “Young Lover,” a tragic depiction of drug addiction that once masked itself behind triumphant electric guitars, reveals the frustration and pain in her voice, an almost uncomfortably close portrayal of a disastrous relationship. The record also gives Clark room to be completely vulnerable—on Masseduction’s “Sugarboy,” the closing refrain of “Boys! Girls!” sounds like an industrial machine running out of juice. Here, Clark embodies this exhaustion, as if fatigued by her own sexual intensity.
Bartlett recontextualizes Clark’s delivery throughout the record via his reinventions of the piano. It builds tension and foreboding in the maudlin dance-with-death “Smoking Section,” punctuating the air between Clark’s increasingly morbid verses. On “Savior,” Bartlett plays the inner strings of his instrument like a violin, the staccato notes fighting against Clark’s drawn-out vocals. The high-octave, mile-a-minute progressions on “Sugarboy” lend a strikingly expressive counterpart to her animalistic, baritone interpretation of the song’s chorus. It might not sound as alien as Clark’s glam guitars, but it makes room for the otherworldly range of emotions in her voice. On “Fear the Future,” the wailing of electric guitars is replaced by maximalist, thundering crashes on the piano, turning an apocalyptic screed into a frenetic fear of the unknown.
Of course, there are natural limits to the acoustic format. Without the sleek production posse of Jack Antonoff and Sounwave, prosaic lyricism has nowhere to hide. The already saccharine chorus of “Pills” sounds like the theatrical performance of a junk food jingle here. Similarly, her thinly veiled criticism of image-obsessed Angelinos on “Los Ageless” loses its sexiness and sheen, leaving in its wake a smokey, hollow cabaret crooner. “Hang on Me,” a woozy post-club comedown, takes on a second life as a kind of modern lullaby, one with a bit of added schmaltz but no less flair than the original, a rendition that wouldn’t feel out of place over a tender familial flashback from “This Is Us.”
For Clark, the intimacy of MassEducation is the natural conclusion to nearly a decade of life behind rotating personas: a jealous, pill-popping housewife, a self-described “near-future cult leader,” and most recently, a sexed-up, technicolor seductress. But on the cover of this record, all we see is Annie Clark: blurry, yes, but also literally laid bare. She has discussed the idea of songs having multiple lives, and that people, too, can live more than one existence in parallel, always aware of their diametric opposite. These songs bridge the gap between the two, exposing the overwhelming darkness that unifies her eclectic output along the way.
