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Loma Vista | twitter.com/st_vincent |
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MASSEDUCTION was ranked third in my Top Ten Albums I Wrote About in 2017, and was awarded the Bronze Cherrybomb for Avantiest-Garde Weapon of Mass Destruction
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The composition of an album cover is a criminally underrated art. To find a single image to represent any subset of the human experience is a heady task, let alone an image that will be permanently embedded in monogamous iTunes charts and fickle Spotify playlists, emblazoned on vinyl sleeves and forever splashed across screens large and small. They say the first bite of the meal is with the eye, and in such a subjective medium first impressions count for a great deal. This task is so deceptively complex and specific that it is frequently botched quite horrifically.
With this in mind, Annie Clark, alias St. Vincent, has always been interested in the prominence of the face.
On her debut record, Marry Me, she looks anything but inviting. A front-on chest-up shot of a mildly annoyed woman, grey on grey, surprised you would have the indecency to listen to her music. On Actor, she has made one eighth of a rotation and stares into the middle distance, a silk blouse and an orange background the only concessions to costume. Strange Mercy stretched white latex over a mouth, open in a silent scream.
And then something changed for number four. The process, as recounted at the album’s close: “Spitting out guts from their gears / Draining our spleen over years / Found my severed crossed fingers in the rubble there.” Her soft brown curls bleached periwinkle with madness, but her eyes, once limpid hazel, radiating intelligence. She gazes levelly, imperiously, from a throne of smooth pink, and looks more like herself than ever — like someone who would decree, “Bring me your loves / All your loves,” and mean it.
That was the self-titled album. The St. Vincent of St. Vincent was the purest distillation of Annie Clark’s artistry. So what comes next? Who is St. Vincent now?
She’s a hell of a lot cheekier, that’s for sure.
The St. Vincent of MASSEDUCTION plunges nosefirst into an impossible tangle of addiction and obsession and intoxication; a Gordonian conflation: sex is drugs, sex is love, and by the transitive property, drugs is love. A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. She dances on the edge between the belligerently kitsch and the impeccably stylish, perpetually threatening to careen headlong into the chasm of melodrama and overwrought cliché. Hers is a voice that gasps and sighs and whoops, teetering on the brink of sanity, possessed of razor-sharp half-crazed blood-soaked lucidity. Like Madonna, she is aggressively, iconoclastically sexual. Like Bowie, she is relentlessly, subversively experimental. And like Prince, she will shred her fingers to ribbons for her art.
Annie sings in haphazard spurts and splashes, to arresting effect. Her honeyed tones smear over blindingly bright synthpop gloss like roadkill on a highway. But when mere words cannot express what must be expressed, she brings her fingers to pick and fretboard and erupts in explosive catharsis. Her hands tear out squeals and shrieks and unhinged screams. She makes her instrument sing. And what a song it is.
“I can’t turn off what turns me on /
Masseduction /
I hold you like a weapon /
Mass destruction /
I don’t turn off what turns me on”
Annie announces her intentions loud and clear. She brings danger and doom, portending worse, slipping hazily between simile and metaphor. The different between ‘can’t’ and ‘don’t’ is elided completely. And this cornucopia of contradictions is only the beginning.
The aspartame rush of a jaunty Camazotz jingle spirals in compulsive loops around the refreshingly direct ‘Pills.’ Annie is so far above tiresome pharmaceutical finger-wagging that the possibility does not appear to have even speculated about the possibility of crossing her star-streaked mind. ‘Sugarboy’ whips up a pixelated frenzy from blips and bloops; Pacman on methamphetamines. She throws herself gleefully over the edge with “Sugarboy / I’m in need / How I wish for something sweet,” then dizzily pirouettes back: “Sugargirl / Dissolve in me / Got a crush from kicked-in teeth.” You can almost taste the plaque hangover preemptively.
But MASSEDUCTION is not all neon confection and friction burns. ‘Happy Birthday, Johnny’ haloes a few spare presses of a piano with a gentle comedown glow for a wrenching moment of intimacy that the regal persona of the previous album would not deign to even consider. Annie’s final valediction to an old friend, “I hope you find peace,” is uncomfortably ambiguous.
Then ‘Savior’ [sic] slinks in, a sexy strutting wardrobe montage. Annie purrs her way through a schoolteacher’s denim skirt, a police officer’s jacket, a rubbery nurse outfit that rides up and sticks to her thighs.
“But I keep you on your best behaviour /
Honey, I can’t be your saviour /
Love you to the grave and farther /
Honey, I am not your martyr /
But then, you say ‘please’”
And whatever conviction she may have had splinters into a jagged melisma of capitulation. The chorus consists only of the word ‘please,’ stretched out like an old pair of nylons.
Bookending this pair of extremes — where Annie is so herself, and where she is literally trying on different costumes — is a second pair, odes to two towering great cities and the people they chew up and spit out. On ‘Los Ageless,’ she laments, “How could anybody have you? / How could anybody have you and lose you?” while on the fluttering ‘New York,’ she slurs, “You’re the only motherfucker in the city who can stand me.”
The boiling tension climbs higher. ‘Fear the Future’ crosses a creation myth with a fairytale, generously drizzling on the decadence: “When the Earth split in two / I was I, you were you.” And then MASSEDUCTION reaches its blazing climax. Annie finds herself at the end of her rope. She snaps on rubber gloves with an affected sardonic sigh, prepared to clean up what is definitely not the first mess.
“Young lover, I’m begging you please to wake up /
Young lover, I wish that I was your drug /
Young lover, I miss the taste of your tongue /
Young lover, I wish your love was enough”
And then something inside her finally snaps.
For once, she cannot sublimate her range with her hands. She takes a thrilling octave leap, and for the first time, she screams with her voice.
The refractory coda slips down a few gears, and the morbidity lurking beneath the surface of MASSEDUCTION takes its opportunity to finally breach. “I’m so glad I came / But I can’t wait to leave.” Annie is exhausted and alone. Her strength ebbs. She sinks into contemplation, velveteen dirge. A flickering montage of invasive thoughts. An errant spark from a cigarette could light her up. Panicking, flailing, drowning. An incessant whisper in her ear: “let it happen, let it happen, let it happen.”
“It’s not the end,” she gasps, over and over again, until it is.
She fades away.
To sleep, perchance to dream.
Annie Clark deploys MASSEDUCTION like a weapon. She draws blood. You’ll be bleeding from the ears and bleeding from the heart, not to mention bleeding from the gums.