St. Vincent - a.k.a. Annie Clark;

NPR is streaming her DC show tonight: http://www.npr.org/2011/10/28/141801564/live-tuesday-st-vincent-in-concert?ps=mh_frhdl1

Covering the Pop Group - She is Beyond Good and Evil on Kimmel

Cru-u-uelllll....

She's very striking in person. Amazingly vivid eyes. And she can fucking play. Best live guitar player I've seen in ages, if not ever.

does it come through on the records in places i'm missing? i like her albums a lot, but i'm not hearing the amazing guitar solo parts i expect, given what i hear about her virtuosity.

I think the live show I saw a few weeks back was pretty amazing, precisely because of the guitar playing. I think on record it's all smoothed out a bit.

definitely. love her live but i can mostly take or leave the records.

^ OTM

xpost Sometimes it's hard to hear her guitar playing on the record because, like Fripp or Belew or whomever, it doesn't always sound like a guitar. But live you get to see what she's up to.

I've had a lot of trouble with this record, even as a fan, because "Cruel" is such a good song but it comes so early in a relatively difficult album. I always turn it off (or tune it out) after "Cruel," even though I know it's good.

http://sickmouthy.com/2011/11/13/some-thoughts-on-st-vincent-and-women-in-music/

Funny thing No.1:

My six year old son asked me this morning whether Strange Mercy was Kate Bush's new album.

Funny thing No.2:

Before she came on stage the other night they were playing Here Comes the Warm Jets and as Baby's on Fire came on it suddenly dawned on me how alike to Fripp Annie Clarke's guitar playing is.

Was that before or after my post four inches above here? ;)

They played Baby's On Fire after house lights came up on Friday! Her choice? She is very Fripp.

New vid casts her as a Ron Mueck sculpture:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEY9GJAm8bA

everything she does sounds like prince to me

Her videos are really good at complementing her songs. I think part of the reason I liked Cruel so much was cos of the video.

i've only listened to this new album a few times, but it's clicking a lot more now than it has in the past. i'm hearing tori amos* + fripp.

(*tori amos if her choirgirl hotel era was more interesting and varied and better-produced than it actually was.)

challlllllllops

Incredible, intense London show last night. Thrilling cover of She Is Beyond Good and Evil.

(*tori amos if her choirgirl hotel era was more interesting and varied and better-produced than it actually was.)

nooooooooooooooooooooooo way!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

like none at all at all. i only listened to the st vincent album a couple of times but certainly in terms of range it's got nothing on choirgirl - even in terms of arrangements tori's a million times more varied, and that's before you get into the amount of genres FTCH covers.

The 90s Tori stan awakes.

Lex, have you heard the Actor album from 2009? I'd suggest checking it out before you dismiss St Vincent outright. Personally found that album a lot more enjoyable than this recent one.

'tori + fripp' kind of works

lexxx i don't know if i have any interest particularly in trying to talk you into liking st. vincent but i don't think breadth of sound and genre is what her last two records are going for at all?

neither did i - i've tried st vincent and it wasn't for me, i was just taking issue with the tori comparison

i didn't really hear any tori in st vincent tbh

a particular way of deploying their high registers strategically? i think there's a resemblance more on the line of one or two common tricks rather than a similarity in the grand shape of their projects. (which is true of the comparison to robert fripp as well obv)

although i would probably rather hear annie clark cover 'in the court of the crimson king' than i would 'cornflake girl#

i didn't really hear any toriesque bloodnguts viscera in annie clark. or any of the wails in the higher register. idk that st vincent album was so low-key charisma-wise, i didn't like her arrangements or production at all but her personality didn't exactly bust through them like tori's would.

Hmm, bloodnguts viscera is exactly the impression I got from her show last night. I hate the "you have to see x live" argument — obviously you won't want to bother if you're not a fan — but the way she swings between vulnerability and violence is gripping. Not that I'd compare her to Tori myself, but I think she has charisma in spades.

Yeah, I'm surprised at what Lex is saying really, and agree with thomp and DL - this is has a lot of character to it - something very frail yet hugely defiant about her sound and lyrics. That video for Cheerleader, where she's gigantic and tied up as a museum exhibit, tries to break the shackles but crumbles to dust, is a perfect representation of her sound. It's like that moment just before you feel as though you're about to have an emotional breakdown and you're trying to keep it together. "You show up with a black eye/Looking to finish the fight/Paint the black hole blacker" is about as much blood'n'guts viscera as it gets really...

yeh she don't sing it like she means it tho. it's like an exercise in songwriting and by the same token it's not dead-eyed stina style deadpan either.
was so pleased my "strange mercy" was faulty. i couldn't conscionably have it knocking about the house.
she writes a corkin' good refrain but can't link them up or develop them adequately to write a good (let alone great) song which is an awful, crying shame. given "marrow" was pretty much flawless, but she needs a producer who will tell her "no, go back and write it again", rather than fleshing out half-arsed sequenced up demos in a cluttery mush of production. eg "Cruel", "swoon"-part, "riff"-part, connected by "drivel"-part (even the riff needs to go up 3 semitones on the last stroke - it disappoints me that my memory of the song is better than the actual song). "chloe in the afternoon" STORMs in, in a prince style, and to my mind doesn't fall apart through design but through not taking the optimum compositional decisions. and so on, and so on. undeserving of the foisted elevation she receives for lack of anything better being offered. the attempted lionization is wish fulfilment

This is all down to a matter of taste, but I think the whole "structures falling apart" is what makes her sound unique. I do much prefer Actor to Strange Mercy, but it's the ever-so-slightly skewed quality, the uneasiness of her sound that makes it what it is.

I thought immediately of St. Vincent vs. Tori b/c they both have the song "Cruel", with a similar sentiment.
Disgree on the Fripp comparison // splitting hairs // Annie is Adrian Belew, in tone, in performance, even in lyrical bent.
There is a selfish part of me that only wants to hear Annie making music in the vein of her Rapeman/Pop Group covers

problem is it's crap-structures-falling-apart.
the refrains are GRAND, but she doesn't know what to do with them. these songs could be so much better and that is what i find so enormously frustrating.

gawd, tori's "cruel" is so much better it's ridiculous, the production and rhythm are so insane on it

like, MARIMBAS

get back to me when annie clark starts using marimbas and whistles in her songs

correction there - i think it's adequate but oft unrelated structures falling apart craply and not in aid of the music, but for lack of an idea what to do with them otherwise. yegads, anyone would think she is ruins / misha mengelberg / the dead c the way people are vaunting this as some kinda revelation. just so peculiar that someone so obviously a very talented musician should have so many absolutely and completely dud chord progressions & unmemorable bridging parts.

get back to me when annie clark starts using marimbas and whistles in her songs

― lex pretend, Wednesday, 29 February 2012 00:22 (10 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that's some pretty narrow criteria for good music TBF. I think the point with Annie Clarke is that she can make her guitar sound like marimbas and whistles.

She's a phenom guitarist trapped in a art pop singer/songwriter that wants to soundtrack movies. The inevitable covers album will be a monster.

saw her last night in oakland, wonderful, even with the bad mushy sound of the fox. major crowd surfing; i'm sure she only weight like 80 pounds but I still wouldn't have wanted to have gotten clocked in the head by her boots. her guitar playing actually reminds me more of adrian belew than fripp, and she has the stage presence of prince.

YES I've been saying Belew for years. Absolutely.

it's funny because i just went back and read an interview with her (av club I think) and he asked her if she'd seen Home of the Brave (Laurie Anderson) and she said no but he drew the same comparison. Glad to know it wasn't my sometimes overly 80's KC-saturated brain making this up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urJZfwaRyFg&feature=share

David Byrne & St. Vincent collaborate for new LP "Love This Giant" out September 10(UK)/11(US) ON 4AD/Todo Mundo

is this the only mention of it on ilx? hm.

hmmm. Single did not wow me.

she has the stage presence of prince

Wow, really? Never seen her live

there's lots of great st. vincent live online - pf linked this one some time back, it's awesome

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N66HPoQBChk

saw her live once and was blown away, only thing might annoy you she's not that "true" to the songs' album sound but if you can get past that it's really something special. there's so much dynamics and she is wiiild :-)

Hmm, the times I've seen her she's generally been very formal, except for the guitar freakouts, which seemed kind of ironic counterpoints to her otherwise intentionally stylized/stiff/cold stage demeanor. I mean, it works, but I would not put her on my short list of dynamic, charismatic performers.

Love her covers, though, which is when I usually see her go nuts. Her Pop Group cover was incredible.

I wish I liked Strange Mercy more, i really do but I don't