St. Vincent - St. Vincent
Critic Score
Based on 44 reviews
2014 Ratings: #5 / 1042
Year End Rank: #2
User Score
2014 Rank: #34
Liked by 262 people
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CRITIC REVIEWS

100
Evening Standard
Clark’s dazzling fourth solo record feels like a breakthrough: the twisted pop, slow-burning ballads and shuddering electronic grooves draw you into her surreal netherworld.
100
NOW Magazine

No other commercial pop artist and few indie ones are doing anything this interesting.

100
musicOMH

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. 

100
The Guardian

The music here feels taut and meticulous, devoid of self-indulgence.

100
DIY

‘St. Vincent’ showcases Annie Clark as a fiercely accomplished musician, a relentlessly original artist, and now, an innovator of pop.

100
Pretty Much Amazing

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.

100
The Arts Desk

St Vincent is an album that revels in its strangeness.

91
Entertainment Weekly

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.

91
Consequence of Sound

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.

91
A.V. Club

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.

90
No Ripcord

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.

90
Paste

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.

90
The 405

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.

90
The Fly

The Oklahoma songwriter is back with some of her most ebullient, ambitiously styled music to date on ‘St Vincent’.

90
AllMusic

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. 

90
Sputnikmusic

St. Vincent is a challenging art pop album that convincingly balances the beautiful with the ugly, and ultimately stays human despite its futuristic leanings.

90
The Line of Best Fit

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.

90
PopMatters

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. 

90
Exclaim!

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. 

90
Slant Magazine

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.

86
Pitchfork

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.

85
Under the Radar

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. 

80
Rolling Stone

St. Vincent is her tightest, tensest, best set of songs to date, with wry, twisty beats pushing her lovably ornery melodies toward grueling revelations.

80
The Irish Times

St Vincent is a beguiling collection by someone with the courage and vision to reach that bit further.

80
Crack Magazine
This album is above all a homage to David Byrne’s insightful tutoring, forcing a dauntless St. Vincent into grasping and tasting her greatest selection of building blocks yet.
80
The Independent

Annie Clark’s fourth album is frequently extraordinary.

80
Northern Transmissions

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.

80
The Telegraph

These songs are the strongest she’s written to date, with terrific hooks and melodies throughout.

80
Spectrum Culture

This is a major step for one of the most compelling songwriters working, yet another sign of her creative fearlessness.

80
Q Magazine
This fourth solo album is daring and hugely composed.
80
Mojo

Clark has whittled a motley crew of characters who sit inside taut, ever so slightly paranoid, Byrne-influenced P-funk ... Wonderful.

80
Uncut

Darkly entertaining, thoughtful and a little threatening, St. Vincent fizzes with enthusiasm and the uncontrollable strangeness of life.

80
Clash

Every song bashes together classic pop with new surprises, pushing this album into must-have territory.

80
FasterLouder

St Vincent may be intimidating in its intelligence, but it remains overwhelmingly accessible.

80
The Skinny

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.

80
American Songwriter

St. Vincent will flatten you like a steamroller the first time around, but it’s the kind of clobbering that grows immediately addicting.

80
SPIN

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.

80
NME

Clark’s readiness to be freakish and alone has translated into her songwriting, which is bolder than ever, and out to connect.

80
Drowned in Sound

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.

70
The Needle Drop

St. Vincent's latest full-length is her most experimental yet!

60
Loud and Quiet

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

60
The Observer

These 11 songs are by far Annie Clark's most accessible ... but all retain her signature quirks.

60
The Sydney Morning Herald

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.

60
Tiny Mix Tapes

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.

redbded
84

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

andiov1
68

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

KIDWITHGUNs
97

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●

LRisnotover
92

I really liked this one.
Fav-Birth in reverse, Digital Witness,I prefer your love
Least fav-Every Tear Disappears

jjww6800
88

Holy shit

Radguy69420
78

Yerp

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Added on: December 9, 2013