No other commercial pop artist and few indie ones are doing anything this interesting.
It’s an album that manages to remain accessible while still sounding challenging and unconventional, an album that can sound heart-stoppingly beautiful one minute and scratchily acerbic the next and, ultimately, an album that’s impossible to grow bored of.
The music here feels taut and meticulous, devoid of self-indulgence.
‘St. Vincent’ showcases Annie Clark as a fiercely accomplished musician, a relentlessly original artist, and now, an innovator of pop.
The ruthlessly taut St. Vincent makes its predecessor appear flabby and loose. St. Vincent – so jagged and sinewy – doesn’t lack lush moments. But they go as soon as they come – with maximum impact.
St Vincent is an album that revels in its strangeness.
Crackling, uncanny, and compulsively listenable, Annie Clark’s fourth album as St. Vincent updates the prickly appeal of bands like the Pretenders and Talking Heads for digitally turbulent times.
Her biggest fans may prefer less direct writing, but it makes St. Vincent her most widely appealing album to date, an infectious work that doesn’t ever feel like a compromise.
All told, St. Vincent is a bold, ambitious, and perfectly overstuffed album. It’s also, as its eponymous title suggests, a new defining moment in Clark’s ever-evolving career.
It’s difficult to think of another artist who’s so consistently inventive and rewarding. Listening to St. Vincent is a more enjoyable experience each time you press play, thanks to its seemingly bottomless well of inspiration.
Clark has transformed both literally and figuratively into an artist every bit as challenging as Ye or her erstwhile collaborator David Byrne. St. Vincent has a gravity that Clark’s peers will, or at least should, not ignore when making their own records from here on out.
It's an album that, despite its placement more as high art, isn't afraid to embrace pop music for everything it's worth, managing to be accessible while also challenging, drawing the listener in with familiarity to then unleash upon them this cryptic, paradoxical world that just begs to be explored over and over again.
The Oklahoma songwriter is back with some of her most ebullient, ambitiously styled music to date on ‘St Vincent’.
St. Vincent is some of her most pop-oriented work, yet it doesn't dilute the essence of her music. If anything, her razor-sharp wit is even more potent when polished in a candy coating with just a hint of venom.
St. Vincent is a challenging art pop album that convincingly balances the beautiful with the ugly, and ultimately stays human despite its futuristic leanings.
St. Vincent showcases a musician and songwriter in total command of her powers, complete with an imperious lilac-platinum bouffant that seems to announce the presence of indie’s undisputed Khaleesi.
Ultimately, though, what amazes me about St. Vincent is that it can flick a switch. Clark eases comedy against tragedy, and trades them ruthlessly, like cards with differently valuable stats.
What's crucial to St. Vincent's excellence is the way Clark balances her sonic explorations with melodies and song structures that keep even her strangest compositions satisfyingly challenging and memorable without ever being either too easy or frustrating.
Her guitar may be her primary tool for shaking up and complicating otherwise strictly defined songwriting, but Clark's voice remains the thing that defines her material, the glittering lynchpin of the glorious, ever-expanding world she's created.
With each release, Clark sounds less like anybody but herself, and more forcefully embraces a darkness that was quietly stirring in even her earliest songs.
On a whole, St. Vincent might not be quite as distinctive or as audacious as Strange Mercy. Clark, however, has found a consistency which is rare among artists, stemming from the confidence she has in her voice and vision.
St. Vincent is her tightest, tensest, best set of songs to date, with wry, twisty beats pushing her lovably ornery melodies toward grueling revelations.
St Vincent is a beguiling collection by someone with the courage and vision to reach that bit further.
Annie Clark’s fourth album is frequently extraordinary.
Certainly, this album has its moments, moments of extremely accessible pop greatness that shine through (and hopefully eclipse) the murk of a few misplaced ballads. St. Vincent fans will not be disappointed, as Clark continues to push boundaries and create her own musical reality.
These songs are the strongest she’s written to date, with terrific hooks and melodies throughout.
This is a major step for one of the most compelling songwriters working, yet another sign of her creative fearlessness.
Clark has whittled a motley crew of characters who sit inside taut, ever so slightly paranoid, Byrne-influenced P-funk ... Wonderful.
Darkly entertaining, thoughtful and a little threatening, St. Vincent fizzes with enthusiasm and the uncontrollable strangeness of life.
Every song bashes together classic pop with new surprises, pushing this album into must-have territory.
St Vincent may be intimidating in its intelligence, but it remains overwhelmingly accessible.
The uniting factor is a funk-centred tautness which runs throughout the record: no instrument or melody is allowed to dominate, and the end result is a deftly-woven, endearingly direct tapestry of genres.
St. Vincent will flatten you like a steamroller the first time around, but it’s the kind of clobbering that grows immediately addicting.
Clark has made an album free of the one issue that hamstrung its three predecessors: the sense that every turn was plotted in advance, that the fun was hemmed in by a kind of deliberateness.
Clark’s readiness to be freakish and alone has translated into her songwriting, which is bolder than ever, and out to connect.
St. Vincent marks herself out as special because she sees the world from a different perspective - in shades of wonderment that you won’t quite comprehend on first listen.
St. Vincent's latest full-length is her most experimental yet!
As beautiful as Annie Clark’s vocals are, by the dying moments of album closer ‘Severed Crossed Fingers’ one can’t help but feel she’s stuck a little too rigidly to a formula and consequently squashed any underlying experimentation with it. dot
These 11 songs are by far Annie Clark's most accessible ... but all retain her signature quirks.
Where 2009's Actor used MIDI orchestration in a study of artifice, St. Vincent amplifies the ersatz, its complex, cacophonous compositions blasting plastic synths and saturated effects.
St. Vincent never adds up to being the album it feels like it should be; this is by far her least fascinating (unsettling, enigmatic, spontaneous) record, even if the surface pleasures are the greatest.
8.4 - Great
I mean, of course it’s good.
Annie Clark, who is most widely known as St. Vincent, recently announced her 6th album, Daddy’s Home, and in preparation, I wanted to listen to some of her music beforehand. St. Vincent was an artist I wanted to check out for quite a bit already, and her self titled release in 2015, due to its stellar album cover and high user score. I jumped in with somewhat high expectations, and yeah, basically all of them were met.
St. Vincent’s ... read more
Random Albums To Review - Entry #1:
So recently I've been running out of ideas on what to give a proper review, so I let the random album button on the bottom of the website choose for me until I got something I thought was worth talking about.
St. Vincent I feel really needs no introduction, she's one of the best art pop artists of the past decade with Strange Mercy being among the cream of the crop of albums that came out in the early 2010s, so it really came as a surprise to me that her ... read more
POWERHOUSE!
This is the kind of music that just... drives me, man...
This is Plastic Beach good. This is Kids See Ghosts good.
Give it a month, the score will change to a 100, I guarantee you.
VIBES - ●IRON THRONE●
I really liked this one.
Fav-Birth in reverse, Digital Witness,I prefer your love
Least fav-Every Tear Disappears
1 | Rattlesnake 3:34 | 88 |
2 | Birth In Reverse 3:15 | 92 |
3 | Prince Johnny 4:36 | 88 |
4 | Huey Newton 4:37 | 88 |
5 | Digital Witness 3:22 | 92 |
6 | I Prefer Your Love 3:36 | 84 |
7 | Regret 3:21 | 86 |
8 | Bring Me Your Loves 3:15 | 82 |
9 | Psychopath 3:32 | 87 |
10 | Every Tear Disappears 3:15 | 79 |
11 | Severed Crossed Fingers 3:42 | 85 |
#1 | / | Double J |
#1 | / | Entertainment Weekly |
#1 | / | Gigwise |
#1 | / | musicOMH |
#1 | / | NME |
#1 | / | No Ripcord |
#1 | / | Slant Magazine |
#1 | / | The Guardian |
#2 | / | BBC Radio 6 Music |
#2 | / | FasterLouder |