ST. VINCENT – Strange Mercy (Part 1)

St. Vincent’s third album, Strange Mercy, may be her best and may be one of the best of the year. But Brandon doubts it’ll bring mainstream popularity. One thing he doesn’t doubt – Annie Clark is the coolest person ever. At least in the top 100. I mean, that’s saying something. There are a lot of friggin’ people in this world.

St. Vincent – “Cruel”

Hear Strange Mercy in its entirety.

From: Brandon Hall
To: Greg Schmidt

I wanted to start this discussion by describing Annie Clark in some lyrical, visual fashion that would do her and the music of her St. Vincent project justice. Initially, I was going to write that she was like the Grim Reaper dressed up as Mary Poppins for Halloween – a sweet, angelic visage in a world of monsters, harboring an evil terror just beneath the surface, a grim truth, if you will, that bubbles up only occasionally to remind you that this sweet exterior is really just an illusion.

I mean, watch this video of her covering Big Black at the Bowery in NYC last May:

I’ve seen that video at least 10 times and it still gives me chills. Annie Clark might be the fucking coolest person ever. I’m just speculating, but that’s my takeaway from that performance.

However, I don’t feel like the Grim Reaper/Mary Poppins description really does her or the music justice, because it implies that she is the agent of some darkness or evil, when, as St. Vincent, she seems more put upon, beset on all sides by cruelty and injustice. Furthermore, one can’t escape the fact that Clark looks like a life-sized doll – tiny frame, enormous eyes, black curly hair, blushed cheeks. And so I think the most apropos metaphor for St. Vincent’s music is that of a doll from Toy Story 3, trapped amongst a collective of discarded and abandoned toys in a fascist and tyrannical system, tortured and beaten mercilessly by those who are supposed to love her, and through it all, smiling.

Yes. That does the trick.

Strange Mercy is the third album from St. Vincent. It’s difficult and dramatic and thrilling. I’ve been addicted to it for the past two weeks. I liken the music to a kind of inverse shoegaze. Where an album like Loveless was built around a concept of beauty fighting and emerging through the muck, St. Vincent’s music is always about the darkness lurking around and hiding within the beauty. Never before has that tension been more profound than on Strange Mercy.

Yet while many critics are predicting Clark’s breakout into mainstream popularity, an outcome that seems, given her looks and coolness and prodigious talent, to be destined, this, her third album, is actually more obtuse and abstract than either of her albums before it. In fact, her trajectory has been consistent: each album more complex and recondite than the last. And while, when listening to Strange Mercy, I’ve had occasion to think, “Wow. This is what music should sound like,” I can hardly imagine any of these songs finding regular play at a Starbucks let alone the radio. Maybe lead single “Cruel” or “Year of the Tiger.” But only for a week. And only at a really hip Starbucks.

Mainstream popularity? Her best shot at that was with some of the catchier, in fact euphorically so, songs on her debut, Marry Me. Feist and Cat Power, she is not. This is a wonderful thing. For me, at least.

Greg, I have so much I want to say about this album, I hardly know where to begin. Since you’ve only recently been introduced to St. Vincent, though, I feel I shouldn’t say too much right out of the gate. I’d like to hear how someone fresh to Annie Clark’s world is adjusting.

“If I ever meet that dirty policeman who roughed you up / No, I, I don’t know what,”
Brandon

Strange Mercy is out 9/13 via 4AD. Order from Amazon or iTunes.