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CRITIC REVIEWS
100
On all fronts, with ‘Daddy’s Home’, St Vincent has delivered spectacularly.
100
It's masterful stuff: a full conceptual realisation, filled with great melodies, deep grooves, colourful characterisations and sonic detail that reveals itself over repeated plays ... Even if its heart is in the '70s, Daddy's Home is a keeper for the decades to come.
100
It’s all hugely impressive and striking, the familiar made subtly unfamiliar, Clark’s famously incendiary guitar playing spinning off at unexpected and occasionally atonal tangents, its effect simultaneously heady and disturbing.
100
Dishing out an evocative explosion of crooning melodies, abstract coolness and an ardent passion for motifs from a seedy metropolis, St Vincent succeeds in her exquisite vision.
100
It sounds – for the first time in a decade – like Clark has slipped out of her high heels and found an equal strength in this barefooted soul.
90
The strongest St. Vincent album since Strange Mercy.
90
Daddy’s Home may lack the more exhilarating, guitar-shredding moments of some of Clark’s earlier work, but it’s possibly her best, most considered album to date.
90
A shining, spectacular addition to her discography, one you had no idea you needed, in many ways a return to her old, Marry Me/Actor era sound with all the aural benefits of being post-Masseduction. This is St. Vincent in the '20s and she is glorious.
90
Forget everything you thought you knew about St. Vincent, because this is Annie Clark 2.0, beamed in from an alternate reality, ready to blow your mind. Daddy’s home, and she’s sounding better than ever.
80
Despite the dark context of the album, Annie Clark sounds the most relaxed she ever has on record.
80
It is less likely to evolve in people’s estimations as her previous few records have—but there is a warmth and a general coziness that exists on this project, the likes of which she has never produced before.
80
Using character-driven sleaze that dips into reality, Annie Clark’s sixth album is a personal and fantastical adventure.
80
The sublime Melting of the Sun honours such female musical pioneers as Nina Simone, Joni Mitchell and Tori Amos – women who gave Clark the confidence to follow her own iconoclastic path. Daddy’s Home is further proof that St Vincent deserves to be considered in their stellar ranks.
80
It’s a record about growing up, and playing it straight; a more open, rounded experience than we’ve come to expect from St. Vincent, it’s a brave, fascinating record.
80
Daddy's Home takes time to unfold in listeners' imaginations. It's much more of a mood than anything else in her body of work, but its hazy reconciliation of the good and bad of the past makes it as an uncompromising statement from her as ever.
80
Annie Clark lures us into the sleazy underbelly of 70s New York on funky-sounding sixth ... The sassy pansexual swagger of 2017's Masseduction survives, but there's a generous allowance of warmth and melancholy.
80
Though this is her most referential album by a longshot, never once does Daddy’s Home veer into mere caricature. It already feels like an essential detour in the broader St. Vincent cosmology.
80
St. Vincent’s sixth studio album is at once a lush playground, an intimate confessional, and an alluring invitation. You’ll be glad you stayed a while.
80
Despite St. Vincent’s decade-spanning career as such a forward-looking artist, her latest effort serves up a more retro flavour.
80
Yes she’s still arch and meta and provocative, still complex and mischievous and ambitious. But on this record, Annie Clark seems to stand just a little closer.
80
Annie Clark recorded her latest wth superproducer Jack Antonoff, arriving at a mutant strain of retro pop steeped in New York lore and evoking anything from Lou Reed to Sheena Easton.
80
Channelling 70s New York funk and her father’s release from prison, the ever brilliant Annie Clark loosens up on her engagingly soulful sixth album.
80
Daddy’s Home feels like a real moment for Clark; not only is it an incredibly successful metamorphosis, the album goes some way to resolving many of the tensions at the heart of her music, without doing her the disservice of showing her hand entirely.
80
While Daddy's Home may not be her best record, it's a bold and rewarding one. And if what we expect from our artists is art — uncompromising, singular, sometimes clumsy and rife with feelings or stories both understandable and not — then few comprehend the exchange quite like St. Vincent.
80
Daddy’s Home is slicker and more professional—and resultantly, more conventional—than anything she’s released to date. And yet, the album’s pitch-perfect ‘70s-retro stylings and testy lyrical themes are just as challenging as anything on 2011’s Strange Mercy.
80
The soul and funk stylings of this, her sixth album, are of the music her father introduced her to as a child; the title Daddy’s Home less in reference to his release from prison – although that’s in there too, Clark signing autographs in the visiting room and “doing time too” – than a reckoning with those roots.
80
Daddy’s Home’ is Clark’s most welcoming record yet, defined by an arch humour which also brings its listeners closer than ever, and filled with compassion for the characters who dwell within it.
80
‘Daddy’s Home’ may be another artistic regeneration, but nostalgia and looser grooves mask gnarly topics: behind the sepia sunglasses St Vincent burrows closer to home than ever before, skewering society in the process.
80
The sepia tone works for the record’s sense of tarnished glamour, and manages not to tip over into on-the-nose nostalgia. Six records in, St Vincent is still reinventing.
78
Annie Clark’s ‘70s-inspired songs are masterful, but lack cohesion outside the album’s detached, irrelevant concept.
77
The final result finds her not back-pedalling, but revisiting her former glories from a new perspective. It’s a topsy-turvy balancing act that she’s playing, but for the most part it’s successful.
75
Most of the 14 songs are weary. Electric sitar adds a psychedelic patina. The album’s glow flickers like worn neon signs the run-down narrators straggle past.
75
Like a Tarantino film, Daddy’s Home mines the real to make something above it, a hyperreal daydream of layabouts and losers, wronged women and wrong men, all loving and losing in the late nights of a long-ago past brought into the present.
70
St. Vincent’s transition to daddy mostly functions because of the depth of the compositions. Daddy’s Home veers on unctuous at certain points but there’s always another layer, another guitar lick, another buried groove, on these intricate mixes.
67
Annie Clark brings the glammy sounds of the ’70s to an album about mothers and daughters, fathers and prison. It’s an audacious and deeply personal record occasionally beset by clunky choices.
60
Daddy’s Home’s wooziness and postulation frequently scan as indulgences enabled by its seventies roots rather than incisive takes on its subject matter.
60
Weighed down by its own concept and bloated with references, there’s just no room left for emotional reckoning.
There’s never a dull moment in the world of Annie Clark.
The antithesis of anything predictable, St. Vincent is an artist with an eye always focused on renovation. Between the dance-floor-ready synthesized mazes of ‘MassEducation’ to the low-fidelity guitar-studded indie-pop of her self-titled record, St. Vincent’s motivation and inspiration never appears to peter out, refusing to fall into one singular classifiable niche, and she shows no sign of running arid on ideas ... read more
St Vincent has the art and the way to offer an absolutely touching and very personal work but she invites you to be fully part of it, as if you were in flesh and blood propelled in deeply buried memories.
There are those who have only written a few pages or a few chapters without ever managing to keep that spark alive, and then there are those who can be counted on the fingers of one hand who go on and on without losing a grain of favour. We can for example refer to St Vincent, one of the ... read more
Always being one to reinvent herself with each album cycle, it makes sense that Annie Clark, known by most as St. Vincent, would follow up her most hyperkinetic, futuristic, and tightest record with something looser and dirtier that reflects on the past. While it’s probably the biggest step away from her older work characterized by noisy, alien production and guitar work, “Daddy’s Home” is some of her finest collection of songs to date and still manages to embody the ... read more
i love st vincent so much, and i think this album perfectly depicts what makes her such an incredible artist. her performance is on another level all the way through this record,. and i think the production is next level. her and jack antonoff have the best synergy on this album and i really dont think many albums come close to this one for me. i really think it is on another level if you can appreciate this kind of music in any capacity
@Missing_Lyriks recommendation (six of eight).
I don't really know what exactly I was expecting this album to sound like, but I was surprised by how experimental and fresh this album sounds. This was one of the albums I had little to no interest in, but as soon as that first funk rock riff hit I was so intrigued by this album and its sound as a whole.
Narrating her story and her dad's time in jail, the album title isn't just something random, it is quite literally about her father coming ... read more
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Track List
| 1 | Pay Your Way In Pain 3:03 | 88 |
| 2 | Down And Out Downtown 3:42 | 87 |
| 3 | Daddy's Home 3:19 | 83 |
| 4 | Live In The Dream 6:29 | 90 |
| 5 | The Melting Of The Sun 4:17 | 90 |
| 6 | Humming (Interlude 1) 0:57 | 72 |
| 7 | The Laughing Man 3:25 | 82 |
| 8 | Down 3:26 | 89 |
| 9 | Humming (Interlude 2) 0:28 | 69 |
| 10 | Somebody Like Me 3:53 | 87 |
| 11 | My Baby Wants A Baby 3:20 | 86 |
| 12 | …At The Holiday Party 4:17 | 84 |
| 13 | Candy Darling 1:55 | 81 |
| 14 | Humming (Interlude 3) 0:38 | 67 |
Total Length: 43 minutes
Year End Lists
| #2 | / | MOJO |
| #2 | / | Slant Magazine |
| #2 | / | USA Today: Patrick Ryan |
| #5 | / | Record Collector |
| #5 | / | The Needle Drop |
| #6 | / | Gaffa (Denmark) |
| #7 | / | The Sunday Times |
| #7 | / | The Wild Honey Pie |
| #8 | / | KCRW |
| #8 | / | The Forty-Five |
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Added on: December 15, 2020