St. Vincent - Strange Mercy
Critic Score
Based on 37 reviews
2011 Ratings: #8 / 1031
Year End Rank: #3
User Score
2011 Rank: #26
Liked by 227 people
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CRITIC REVIEWS

100
The Observer

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.

100
The Telegraph

The third album from Texan singer and Bon Iver collaborator Annie Clark is a flawless exercise in arty pop subversion.

95
The 405

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.

91
Entertainment Weekly
Annie Clark’s third album luxuriates in sound — blurps and gurgles and beats and textures that surround her floaty prog-pop songs. It’s cerebral and a little chilly, but also full of musical surprises.
91
Pretty Much Amazing

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.

91
A.V. Club

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.

90
Drowned in Sound

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.

90
American Songwriter

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.

90
Under the Radar

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.

90
Consequence of Sound

Strange Mercy achieves that sweeping goal, delivering on its promises, challenging thematically and intellectually, while also entertaining.

90
SPIN
Clark’s complex femininity, both self-possessed and keenly evolving, is what makes her music so powerful and fascinating.
90
NME

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.

90
PopMatters

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.

90
Pitchfork

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.

90
No Ripcord

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.

87
Coke Machine Glow
It’s a great album—one of the best of the year—but perhaps more importantly also in the sense that it’s an album that holds at arms’ length, and makes the subject of its various neuroses, the very praise it’s positioned to receive.
86
Spectrum Culture
She dances with the rhythm, striking a pitch-perfect balance between the incredibly visceral and the delightfully dreamy. At times, it’s even as if she isn’t singing as much as the words are simply happening in the air.
86
Beats Per Minute

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.

80
The Guardian
It's a little top-heavy, and meanders towards the end, but it's smart, demanding and unique, too.
80
Evening Standard
It shouldn't work, but it does: brilliantly unique and uniquely brilliant.
80
Q Magazine
Uneasy listening from honey-tongued, dark-hearted singer.
80
Record Collector

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.

80
The Needle Drop

While many moments on Strange Mercy are, uh, strange, I found this record incredibly easy to get into.

80
Prefix

Strange Mercy is her best yet, a deft mixture of self-confession, master class musicality, and downright unshakable songs.

80
NOW Magazine
Annie Clark, aka St. Vincent, is an astounding electric guitarist, yet on her absorbing third album she never puts her mastery of the instrument ahead of a great song.
80
Mojo
Strange Mercy is the shimmering, expansive sound of an artist defiantly coming into her own.
80
musicOMH

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.

80
Clash

‘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.

80
Slant Magazine

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.

80
The Skinny

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.

80
The Fly
Packed with vivacity and adolescent anxiety ... ‘Strange Mercy’ is glorious.
80
AllMusic

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.

80
Paste

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.

70
Tiny Mix Tapes
In the album’s best moments, Clark shows us she can be complex without relying on contradiction. But she doesn’t do so often enough.
70
Rolling Stone
Annie Clark's third LP under the moniker is as busily inventive as ever. But it's also hookier, sexier, more unhinged.
60
The Independent

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.

60
The Irish Times

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.

BradTasteMusic
78

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.

Nightwing734
60

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

redbded
81

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

emyvuitton
80

first half of the album was noticeably better than the second

Radguy69420
95

Zoo-we-mama

AnotherWhiteMan
90

White man approved.

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