All Born Screaming by St. Vincent
St. Vincent’s seventh full-length, All Born Screaming, isn’t necessarily a return to the “true” St. Vincent after the arch dress-up indie-pop games of 2021’s Daddy’s Home. If the disguises went away, then the name above the title would be the name behind St. Vincent: Annie Clark.
Yet the face does seem to fit the mask(s) more closely here, especially with Clark sinking into the darkness she explored from other angles on her 2007 solo debut, Marry Me, and layering sounds with the brio she and David Byrne flaunted on their 2012 collaboration, Love This Giant.
Like Byrne, Clark inclines toward creative directional changes that turn out to be less abrupt than a first listen implies. The fuzzed-out PJ Harvey ferocity of “Broken Man” connects roughly to the noisiness of 2014’s St. Vincent, while the beetle-browed moodiness of the piano in “Reckless” calls upon the same black angels Nick Cave habitually implores.
Although many other comparisons rapidly come to mind as one song follows another—the synthesizers rattling the rhythm of “Big Time Nothing” could be drawn from Björk circa “Army of Me,” while “Violent Times” is a more dramatically sound James Bond theme than Sam Smith created for Spectre—Clark takes possession of each track.
Part of that possession comes from her takeover of the production. She consistently measures out balancing amounts of technical clarity and emotional tonality; she also makes sure that quality players, like Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl and quirky Welsh pop musician and producer Cate Le Bon, handle the instruments she can’t.
The rest comes from her voice both as singer and as composer. She can be as cool as John Cale or as sub-operatic as an overexcitable R&B star, and she can, in the lengthy title finale of All Born Screaming, swing between trebly Graceland-era Paul Simon guitar and a postmodern-gospel coda. It’s not that Annie Clark is herself inside St. Vincent. It’s that she’s many selves.
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Get All Born Screaming at Amazon here.
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