Annie Clark's bold and almost jarringly confident fourth record, St. Vincent, does not sound like it was recorded here on Earth. Its songs sprout with their own strange, squiggly lifeforms and are governed by unfamiliar laws of gravity. Check out the first one, "Rattlesnake", a song that's bare, Kraftwerky, and full of imagery that is somehow both Edenic and post-apocalyptic. Clark glances around: "Am I the only one in the only world?" She spots the title creature, gasps, and then comes this song's idea of a chorus, like melodic gagging, or distress expressed in an 8-bit video game: "AH-AH-AH-AH-AH-AH AHH AHH/ AH-AH-AH-AH-AH-AH AHH AHH." You often get the sense in a St. Vincent song that Clark has touched down on a desolate, previously unexplored planet without an air supply and is showing off the fact that—for the moment at least—she can still breathe.
Given the fangs she bares on St. Vincent, it seems like Clark could take that snake, easily. Over the course of four albums, many early-career guest spots, and a 2012 collaboration with David Byrne, Clark has been focusing her vision and sharpening her music's edges; were it not for Google image search, it would be easy to convince yourself that you merely dreamed those days when she wore butterfly wings with Sufjan Stevens and blithely flowing robes with the Polyphonic Spree. With each release, Clark sounds less like anybody but herself, and more forcefully embraces a darkness that was quietly stirring in even her earliest songs. "You don't mean that, say you're sorry," she chimed in a creepy, Bride of Chucky voice on her still-magnificent debut single, "Now, Now". But the smirking overlord that stares out from the cover of St. Vincent does not apologize, not for any of the unpleasantries she utters through gritted teeth, nor the much nastier things she blurts out her fingers.
St. Vincent continues Clark's run as one of the past decade's most distinct and innovative guitarists, though she's never one to showboat. Her harmonic-filled style bears the influence of jazz (she picked up a lot of her signature tricks from her uncle, the jazz guitarist Tuck Andress) and prog rock, two genres known to embrace sprawl. But Clark's freak-outs are tidy, modular and architecturally compact—like King Crimson rewritten by Le Corbusier. Even at its most spazzy, there's always something efficient about St. Vincent. The stark, spring-wound single "Birth in Reverse" doesn't waste a second on superfluous sounds, and the same goes for the corrosive crunch of "Regret", which sounds like a classic rock song pared down to its most essential elements. All the negative space in that last one makes Clark's riffs hit that much harder, especially when—in one of the most thrilling moments on the album—a solo strikes down out of nowhere like a cartoon lightning bolt.
Critics of St. Vincent call her pretentious. Fair enough—these are the sorts of songs that dare take themselves seriously and tack on easy suffixes like "in America" when they want to let you know they are Making a Statement. But there's an under-appreciated playfulness about Clark's music that balances this out. I can't think of much contemporary guitar-based music that has this much fun with texture—the rubbery whiplash percussion on "Prince Johnny", the stretched-taffy vocals on "Bring Me Your Loves", the gleefully synthetic-on-purpose sheen of "Digital Witness". At best, St. Vincent has a mischievous curiosity about texture (and explosions) that feels almost childlike. Recently my 8 year-old cousin asked me, with a wicked twinkle in his eye, if I'd ever microwaved a banana. I'm terrified to try, but I'm sure whatever happens—splattering, abrupt, radioactive—sounds exactly like an Annie Clark guitar solo.
"What's the point in even sleeping/ If I can't show, if you can't see me?" Clark asks on the single "Digital Witness", a rather on-the-nose critique of our hyper-transparent, Instagram-your-every-meal culture. It's tempting to label St. Vincent Clark's anti-internet album, but that wouldn't be quite right—it knows too well what a life mediated through screens feels and sounds like to be sending it up entirely. (In fact, digital life may have influenced her concise, anti-jam style: "I have some restless ears, and I now have a fractured attention span because I'm like living in the modern world," she said in a recent interview. "So I'm like, how do I make this sound interesting to myself?") "Huey Newton" is maybe one of the best songs ever written about falling down a late-night, vaguely depressive internet k-hole ("Pleasure dot loathing dot Huey dot Newton/ Oh, it was a lonely, lonely winter"); seemingly stream-of-conscious references to Black Panthers, Byzantine architecture, and the Heaven's Gate cult flicker by like puzzlingly connected Wikipedia pages. The common threads emerge if you look closely. From the self-coronated Prince Johnny to the "near-future cult leader" Clark has fashioned herself on the album cover, there's a fascination with power, faith, and mind-control running through these songs—learning how to sell yourself your own lines well enough to sell them back to other people, too.
"I was reading Miles Davis' biography," Clark says of her Beyoncé-like decision to self-title a record this late in her career, "and he says that the hardest thing for a musician to do is sound like yourself." In that sense, it's a perfect title. St. Vincent is the Platonic ideal of a St. Vincent record, executing with perfect poise everything we already know she can do. But this also is why it falls just short of being her best. That honor still goes to Strange Mercy, which had a capacity to surprise and defy expectations in a way that this record does not. Strange Mercy was easier to connect to emotionally ("If I ever meet the dirty police man who roughed you up," she cooed on the title track, a line that was as jarring for its tenderness as it was for its violence) and gave Clark a little more room to stretch her legs in the grooves. The pixelated shredding on "Huey Newton" and "Regret" are great, but nothing here feels as unhinged as the borealis chaos of at the end of "Northern Lights" or the razor-sharp coda of "Surgeon". The Bowie-esque metamorphosis suggested by the cover image doesn’t mean she’s reinvented her sound. Of course it's not the worst problem for an artist to have, but Clark's become so good at being St. Vincent that, on future releases, she risks boxing herself in. You hope the next album finds her coloring outside the lines she's so meticulously drawn for herself.
Still, it’s hard to ask too much more from an album that boasts melodies as lovely as "Prince Johnny" and "Severed Crossed Fingers". That last one is the best closing song on a St. Vincent album yet—a self-deprecating, slow-motion parade of a ballad that sounds like if Lorrie Moore had written the non-existent lyrics to “Here Come the Warm Jets”. (This song and “Birth in Reverse” both take their wry titles from Moore’s great short story collection Birds of America.) It’s a moment of vulnerability and bleak hope rounding out Clark’s hardest, tightest, and most confident record to date—a vaguely ominous promise of better days ahead. "We’ll be heroes on every bar stool," she vows, sounding so sure of herself that you’re liable to follow her to whatever planet she’s headed.
