Photo credit: Kelsea McCulloch
With the mainstream music landscape so densely filled with safe bets and established formulas, it’s always a pleasant surprise when any artist manages to cut through the trends and marketing calculations to really bring some creative weirdness to the masses. At the moment, you’d be hard pressed to find a better example of this kind of eccentric success story than St. Vincent—also known as songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Annie Clark.
With each album, Clark has cemented her status as one of the most creative provocateurs in indie rock, and she’s also managed to gain considerable traction in the wider pop market; her brand new album, Masseduction, even landing on the Billboard Top-10 charts. That translated into a lot of excited fans packed into the Riverside Theater Friday night and, as usual, St. Vincent didn’t disappoint.
Those familiar with St. Vincent’s live shows likely knew she often performs in the “An Evening With …” format (meaning sans opener), so when the lights first went out, many expected her to emerge but instead were treated to a short film—Clark’s directorial debut—which she created for an upcoming female-helmed horror anthology called XX. Entitled The Birthday Party, it’s the deeply anxious and blackly comic tale of a woman, played by character actress Melanie Lynskey, who tries (and inevitably fails) to discreetly dispose of a dead body during her young daughter’s kid-filled celebration.
After the intermission, the curtain was pulled back again, but only about three feet. In the small gap, St. Vincent, dressed in a neon-pink, space-age go-go outfit—fitting, considering the desire-driven themes of Masseducton—performed “Marry Me,” which led into a set of older favorites that dominated the first half of the show. With each entry, the curtain was pulled back more, revealing other curtains and other microphones, all arranged at odd angles.
Playing with the typical concert perspective was a clever way of nodding at the different phases of her oeuvre, but the second segment of the evening was more straightforward, if no less entrancing. Standing atop a circular platform, she electrifyingly ran through much of the new album, and while the pulsing avant-pop grooves kept the energy up, her impeccable, unpredictable guitar work and conceptual stage presence stole the show. Hopefully she keeps the hits coming.
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