St. Vincent: St. Vincent

Emily Zemler on February 25, 2014

St. Vincent, the musical project of singer and multi-instrumentalist Annie Clark, is an acquired taste. Clark’s songwriting embraces strange melodic angles and unconventional structures, reverberating with a wide-eyed sense of impassioned madness and occasional chaos. On her latest full-length, which she’s self-titled, the instruments and vocals blur together, often indistinguishable from one another, creating insistent songs that teeter on sounding mechanistic. The complexly built “Birth In Reverse” goes in all directions at once, revealing the more aggressive side of Clark’s aesthetic, while numbers like “I Prefer Your Love” find lovely hushed moments of repose. There’s a lot of sifting through various sounds to find instances of connection on the album, which inevitably leads the listener to either commit to repeated listens or decide this isn’t for them. And it’s not for everyone. But once you get through Clark’s walls of indistinct noise there is something evocatively interesting inside.

Artist: St. Vincent
Album: St. Vincent
Label: Loma Vista /Republic