St. Vincent has been as creatively valuable an alter ego for Annie Clark as Lady Gaga has been for Stefani Germanotta. The difference is that Clark’s shroud is transparent, and Daddy’s Home, the sixth St. Vincent studio full-length, is no less a revelation than its predecessors.
It’s also, following 2017’s Masseduction, the second album Clark has co-produced and partially co-written with Jack Antonoff, the Fun. alumnus and Bleachers mastermind who’s collaborated significantly with Lorde and Taylor Swift. The pop and rock badges he helps her flash thus reflect gold and platinum.
The St. Vincent shroud on Daddy’s Home isn’t so shiny as that. Instead, it’s stained with the grime of 1970s New York City and smudged with memories of sounds and songs that were unavoidable from the late 1960s to the early 1980s.
Because we share those memories, we can easily catch Clark’s sources: she so openly lifts the melodic brightness of “My Baby Wants a Baby” from Sheena Easton’s 1981 hit “Morning Train (9 to 5)” that she gives the latter song’s composer, Florrie Palmer, a co-writing credit on the former; and “Live in the Dream” manifests symptoms from the catatonia of Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb.”
Yet Clark and Antonoff vamp up their inspirations with a solemn playfulness not unlike Beck’s, filtering “Live in the Dream” through the Beatles’ prismatic “Sun King” and layering John Cale’s expatriate eclecticism into “Candy Darling,” a spiritual sequel to Lou Reed’s Velvet Underground tribute to the titular Warhol and transgender idol.
Darling’s pride and tragedy exist in Clark’s voice, which remains the consistent St. Vincent distinction from the indie breakout of 2007’s Marry Me through redefinitions like 2014’s homonymous album or Love This Giant, her 2012 disc with David Byrne.
Tuneful and sometimes raw, and innocent even when decadent, the voice is the Annie Clark signature beneath the St. Vincent shroud. Daddy’s Home is a trashily glamorous letter to which she applies that signature. With an elegantly odd flourish.
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