The strings and woodwind have been turned down in favour of a harder sound, dominated by off-kilter drums and queasy synths, with Clark's electric guitar filling the gaps with intricate runs, riffs and fills.
The third album from Texan singer and Bon Iver collaborator Annie Clark is a flawless exercise in arty pop subversion.
More than anything this is just an outstanding album--one of the best you’ll hear all year, and likely one of the best you’ll hear over the next several years.
Strange Mercy is Clark’s most whole, poignant work to date. It’s an exciting evolution for St. Vincent’s sound — a visceral album full of beauty and chaos.
Engaging the darkness (rather than just acknowledging it) adds some flesh-and-blood humanity to an artist whose excellent output has nonetheless been marked by cold distance.
This is an album that rockets toward you, ricochets through your emotions and finally decides to lay you down on the floor, headphones on, tumbling around like a blissed-out cat in the sun.
Experimental music never sounded like this though. Like St. Vincent’s previous work, Strange Mercy is fresh and punctuated with purpose. Its tangents never evade the listener but surprise and delight.
Where Clark previously impressed through the sheer audacity of her strengths as a songwriter and arranger, here she has stopped trying to impress and simply made an album assembled through feel and intuition, and, taken as a whole, it feels perfect.
Strange Mercy achieves that sweeping goal, delivering on its promises, challenging thematically and intellectually, while also entertaining.
It’s this combination of unforced sonic gorgeousness and a refusal to settle for the obvious that puts Clark in a field of her own, and makes for a strange and wonderful record that shows no mercy in blowing your mind.
On Strange Mercy, Clark continues to sharpen and finetune her act, coming off bolder in her aesthetic, yet more immediate and intimate as a performer.
On Strange Mercy, she ditches Marry Me's naivety and Actor's ostentatious arrangements, boosts the inventive guitar playing, and ends up with her most potent and cathartic release yet.
The role of the music in conveying Annie Clark’s message has been upped, the lyrics are more personal, the production is richer, and Clark’s velvety voice is now threatening as often as it is beautiful; Strange Mercy is a more ambitious record featuring improved songwriting that is littered with Clark’s personal tribulations.
Clark is more divulgent of her true personal feelings than we’ve come to expect, and she’s created a dense collection of songs to reflect this atmosphere.
A brave, uncompromising and lyrically elliptical record that has more than its fair share of spell-binding moments, Strange Mercy demonstrates once again the reason so many hold St Vincent in such high regard.
While many moments on Strange Mercy are, uh, strange, I found this record incredibly easy to get into.
Strange Mercy is her best yet, a deft mixture of self-confession, master class musicality, and downright unshakable songs.
It may not be leaps and bounds ahead of previous St Vincent releases, but this is a rich and multi-faceted album to pay close attention to.
‘Strange Mercy’ is sparse and beautiful; woodwind, brass and even a clavinet are utilised with deftness to create a sense of light and space around Clark’s mesmeric vocal and experimental arrangements.
Clark’s bare, sedate St. Vincent persona is the highlight of Strange Mercy, reflecting all the terror, beauty, and allure of her music more effectively than any cantakerous narrator could muster.
Neither as immediate nor as stylistically dazzling as its predecessor, Strange Mercy manages to succeed entirely on its own terms by dint of Clark's willingness to embrace her own idiosyncratic impulses, and in doing so, to reveal more of herself.
Full of great lyrics and great playing, Strange Mercy is St. Vincent's most reflective and most audacious album to date, and Clark remains as delicately uncompromising an artist as ever.
Strange Mercy is an album that’s full of ambitious attempts to create rich tableaus that defy the expectations they create. Some work, and some don’t, but the ones that don’t will probably age well given that a few dozen listens won’t leave you bored.
Clark has jettisoned the baroque string and woodwind arrangements that marked 2009's Actor, in favour of more direct, guitar-based settings. Not that these songs are any less strange for that.
The constant modifications of tempo and style mean that Strange Mercy is hard to adjust to at times; it seems as if Clark is so intent on packing every idea in that the album's structure occasionally becomes unsound.
Some of her best songs are here, but also a couple of really boring ones that I’d probably skip every time. Great album overall.
Art-pop is really a hit-or-miss genre for me, the music is on this album is very cool but it kind of just went in one ear and out the other. I will try and listen to more stuff like this and maybe even more st vincent projects hoping I would enjoy that more
8.1 - Great
Well at this point, St. Vincent is easily one of the most consistent artists in the game.
Strange Mercy, the 3rd album by the artist, is continuing proof that she is one of the more consistent artists of the 2010s. However, I feel that the appeal of all of her albums is based on what the listener likes the most. For me, Daddy’s Home is my personal favorite, with its excellent songwriting and psychedelic 70s style, with her self titled being a close runner up, with its jumpy, ... read more
1 | Chloe In the Afternoon 2:55 | 86 |
2 | Cruel 3:34 | 93 |
3 | Cheerleader 3:28 | 89 |
4 | Surgeon 4:25 | 92 |
5 | Northern Lights 3:33 | 87 |
6 | Strange Mercy 4:28 | 93 |
7 | Neutered Fruit 4:13 | 83 |
8 | Champagne Year 3:28 | 85 |
9 | Dilettante 4:03 | 86 |
10 | Hysterical Strength 3:16 | 84 |
11 | Year of the Tiger 3:28 | 87 |
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