MASSEDUCTION is a remarkable record, a certain contender for album of the year and demonstrable proof that Clark is an artist working at the height of her powers.
Masseduction delivers sketches of chaos with stunning clarity. It's the work of an always savvy artist at her wittiest and saddest.
Masseduction is a work of genius light years ahead of its indie, rock and pop counterparts. St Vincent’s unashamed move into pop is a Bowie-like masterstroke with hit after hit emerging: teaming up with Bleacher’s frontman and Lorde producer Jack Antanoff has proven a powerful move.
Clark creates her own internal logic, ensuring each record inhabits a unique, Narnia-like universe. Masseduction is no different; in fact, this latest record is Clark’s best, most cohesive musical statement yet.
MASSEDUCTION joins Grimes’ Art Angels and Lorde’s Melodrama as the inverse of a traditional pop album, one that undercuts the very genre it lifts. St. Vincent has consolidated, digested, and now transcended her former styles. What’s left is an artist reframing the landscape, a reverse-chameleon who can’t camouflage, but transforms the world around her instead.
Ultimately, MASSEDUCTION defies explanation and critique, rendering the critic a dead weight in the dust of its ever-accelerating sucker-punch of ideas.
Yes, MASSEDUCTION is worthy of being treated like an event, but whether or not it tops her previous two excellent efforts is a little tougher to support.
On MASSEDUCTION, Clark remains as unpredictable as ever, though there’s one thing fans will have gotten right: so far, at least, Annie Clark has proven incapable of writing anything less than a knockout pop song.
MASSEDUCTION has set the bar high for the rest of the indie rock universe and proves that St. Vincent is a truly unique talent that is both innovative and entertaining.
Annie Clark gets personal on a clutch of tales about power and lust.
Accessible but challenging, Masseduction thumbs its nose at genre while Clark’s choice of producer – Jack Antonoff – roots it firmly in pop; it is, after all, an attempt to jump Clark from cult act to mass seductress. It’s working.
MASSEDUCTION is an album that mixes themes like it does liquor in a cocktail, but above all it’s an album that puts aside metaphor and pageantry to show us exactly what goes on in Clark’s head. As it turns out, it’s just as interesting and beguiling as anything she’s ever released.
Annie Clark’s industriously idiosyncratic manner on previous St. Vincent releases has often given the impression that she’s trying to distract her listeners, wreathing songs in such swirls of sonic invention that one sometimes loses track of which direction they’re headed, or what they’re about. That’s not so much the case with Masseduction.
For all its slippery surface bravado, Masseduction also offers a frank exploration of the tension between defiance and vulnerability, hedonism and self-destruction.
Each album Clark makes is a leap forward. If she’s aiming to ravish the lot of us, mission accomplished.
Clark promised us "sex and drugs and sadness" on MASSEDUCTION, and while that sounds like a recipe for clichéd disaster, she kept her word and managed to fashion a totally refreshing take in the process.
MASSEDUCTION is in many ways a complicated struggle between St. Vincent the art project and Annie Clark the human being.
Recorded in Los Angeles, Antonoff’s studio in Brooklyn, NY, along with Electric Lady Studios in Manhattan, the new CD Masseduction is a different kind of record – one minute haunting like the excellent “Hang On Me” to the new single “Los Ageless,” Masseduction tends to draw you in, like all good records should.
It takes some time to get past the initial discomfort that comes with MASSEDUCATION’s brazen and divergent antics, but at the end of the road there’s quite a good record worth delving into. You might end up being surprised by how much of yourself you see in St. Vincent’s “weirdest” effort to date.
It’s somewhat off-putting to witness Clark, who handles her artful presence with mannered precision, discard any sight of a clear objective on Masseduction.
St. Vincent delivers her most inconsistent album yet with MASSEDUCTION.
Against all odds, St. Vincent just keeps getting better. Her self-titled album set an impossibly high bar, but MASSEDUCTION vaults right over it. The bangers bang and the ballads will have you bawling. Like Annie, I can’t turn off what turns me on... and that means I’ll have this record on repeat until her next one drops. Nothing to fear in that future.
Favorites: “Hang on Me,” “Pills,” “Masseduction,” “Los Ageless,” “New ... read more
On MASSEDUCTION, St. Vincent proves again that she's ahead of the curve, able to provide commentary on society's contemporary views of fervor while still self-mythologizing. These cunning lyrics atop her seasoned pop-rock instincts culminate into an album that will be among the year's best.
"Carregado de poder e uma beleza devastadora, 'MASSEDUCTION' encontra uma Annie Clark em pura catarse emocional."
Vinda de uma carreira consistente dentro da indústria musical, a artista St. Vincent experimentou de tudo um pouco, com suas canções possuindo grandes influências do indie rock, do rock alternativo e do electropop. Já aqui se tem um disco carregado de sintetizadores e com um teor maximalista indo desde a sonoridade até os visuais ... read more
1 | Hang on Me 2:48 | 82 |
2 | Pills 4:40 | 89 |
3 | Masseduction 3:17 | 90 |
4 | Sugarboy 4:01 | 85 |
5 | Los Ageless 4:41 | 93 |
6 | Happy Birthday, Johnny 2:58 | 84 |
7 | Savior 3:26 | 85 |
8 | New York 2:34 | 88 |
9 | Fear the Future 2:31 | 80 |
10 | Young Lover 3:33 | 82 |
11 | Dancing With a Ghost 0:46 | 73 |
12 | Slow Disco 2:44 | 85 |
13 | Smoking Section 3:37 | 84 |
#1 | / | Dork |
#1 | / | The Guardian |
#1 | / | The New York Times: Jon Pareles |
#2 | / | musicOMH |
#2 | / | Pretty Much Amazing |
#2 | / | Slant Magazine |
#2 | / | The A.V. Club |
#2 | / | Vinyl Me, Please |
#3 | / | BrooklynVegan |
#3 | / | Diffuser |