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

Really liking Live The Dream on the new album. There's a few other really pretty moments on here but overall it sounds a bit unfocused. I like the idea of her getting a bit more loose, I'm just not convinced the songs are there.

I learned enough on my first pass to know that by the sixth pass at least half of these songs are going to be planted deep in my brain.

first listen reaction is that this feels a lot longer than 43 minutes

Electric Sitar content A+

Once through, I like some of the warm 70s-style instrumentation and the part where she sings "Mississippi good god-damn," but I'm not hearing much in the way of melody, compelling lyrics, or variety. The last one took its time growing on me, though, so maybe I'll have the same experience here.

The whole album minus the interludes has been uploaded to the offical SV YouTube channel.

I'm not hearing much in the way of melody, compelling lyrics, or variety

^^^ I got bored and wished I was listening to actual music from the early / mid 70s. The thing is that a lot of the music from that period is not boring, but instead very dynamic and energetic. But this album is like a non drug person's idea of what being on drugs is like. Also it's so humourless. As bad as some of Lou Reed's records were in the 70s, they were often funny (sometimes unintentionally but whatever).

The album is not as bad as I thought it'd be but the 70s cosplay/fetishization feels unneccessarily forced at times, Lindsay Zoladz nails it:

Clark and her co-producer, Jack Antonoff, have clearly had fun with the creation of this finely tuned alternate universe, but at a point, its many detailed references start to feel like clutter, preventing the songs from moving too freely in their own ways. The yawning single “The Melting of the Sun” is weighed down by constant, wink-wink verbal and sonic quotations of ’70s rock; “Hello from the dark side of the moon,” Clark sings, as her guitar wolf-whistles like Steve Miller’s in “The Joker.” “Like the heroines of Cassavetes, I’m under the influence daily,” she sings, a little too on the nose, on the drifting “The Laughing Man.” One indelible highlight is the gorgeously immersive psychedelia of “Live in the Dream,” but it is also a Pink Floyd-indebted slow-burner that begins with an echoing, “Hello …” Get it? Too often, these references feel as though they’re there just for the sake of cleverness. As a result, more frequently than it invents or reveals, “Daddy’s Home” gestures.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/13/arts/music/st-vincent-daddys-home-review.html

i wasn't expecting there to be a pink floyd pastiche of all things on this, nor would i have expected one to be pretty good like it is

“Like the heroines of Cassavetes, I’m under the influence daily,”

Wyclef-level bad.

yeah thats a true groaner

review is mostly otm. i dont mind pastiche for its own sake, but she whiffs it with this imo. the songs feel lightweight, and she wants the arrangements to do most of the heavy lifting but it does the thing that weak pastiche does where there are so many references, but every 70s rock song didnt have the sound of every 70s rock song piled into it, like the sounds were all grafted in from some master list. ends up sounding creaky and strained to me, "how do you do fellow 70s kids, i was just thinking about schoolhouse rock while playing sitar with harry nilsson on soul train"

^yes but also, including that crypto cover of a Sheena Easton tune just highlights how unmemorable the rest of the melodies are. Still it’s a pleasant listen.

that was the only song that stood out to me in the initial play-through I just made myself listen through to

https://slate.com/culture/2021/05/st-vincent-daddys-home-review-annie-clark.html

An effective and compassionate pan? "There’s a larger, truer life beyond mundane facts, and the impersonal doesn’t have to be apolitical" made me gasp

Some of the criticism written about this record has been way more insightful then any of the lyrics on this record.

Carl is clear-eyed as always, and he's right that lyrics have never been her strength (which is hard to ignore when I see them quoted by fans constantly)

well written review

listened to the full thing and i have never been much of a fan so i'm a little surprised that i found it to be generally pretty good. i think probably because it's so far removed for the most part from her usual style (apart from like, the "pay your way in pain" bassline) in favour of outright 70s pastiche, and i like her reference points here much more than her previous sound. "melting of the sun" and "pay your way in pain" are among the weaker tracks so pretty weird choices as the singles

the lyrics are pretty dreadful but that's always been a huge a weakness of hers yeah so whatever

I'm finding this album very uninvolving for whatever reason. Just...the songs aren't very memorable.

i found this to be pretty unpleasant tbh, like her arch vocals and the woozy 70s keybs just do not turn into something i would want to listen to again.

Everything about the aesthetic delivery of the record has put me off it without listening to it. The Slate review I found shocking because nobody writes like that anymore - or perhaps did so before.

It's genuinely distressingly bad album cover too. Springsteen-level bad.

I saw this diminutive minx open for John Vanderslice this past Saturday night. Her fretwork is notably accomplished and while playing solo her effects pedals and samplers laid out an ample and surprisingly varied setlist.
― christoff, Monday, April 16, 2007 4:32 PM (fourteen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

also fucking lolllll

sorry, just flying in here without listening to the music to say :

https://i.imgur.com/nK139QL.png

this is the most 70s-tribute thing i've ever seen. there was an image i was addicted to, when i was a kid. this was the late 80s. an uncle gave me some old baseball magazines, and in one of them there were two young people standing in a river, both of them topless, a man and a woman. i saw his nipples, not hers. she was pouring out a giant bootfull of river water. he was laughing really hard, and i think the ad was for cigarettes.

i've seen 100 ads like this, and they were all better. boo

but i'm going to listen to the god dang album

very 1971 reprise liner notes though

is it more of a 70s tribute than even the campaign for the new bruno mars/anderson paak album?

huh. god i hate music

i don't know anything about music these days. fuck it all, if it's like this!

listen, this is the end of time!!

This is bad and that's OK.

I keep seeing more and more Bowie comparisons in reviews for this album, at least wrt to the "character" evolution with each album cycle. Which, I guess I get the impulse, but Bowie's characters always seemed so out of time and space and weren't tied to such explicit nostalgic triggers (although I guess maybe Young Americans era Bowie came closest?). Maybe it's because we've been inundated with 70s retro worship since essentially the early 90s, but this feels lazy for some reason.

the album really doesn't sound a bit like bowie either, which makes that comparison rather superficial

Yeah, I don't read any of the Bowie mentions as sonically, more just shorthand for "she likes to create new persona for each album cycle".

fwiw I think creating personas is cool and interesting, even if this seems more calculated than when people have done it in the past. but the music still needs to interest me. anyway I suspect we are mostly all on the same page here.

'Down' is the only track on this album I can sort-of stand, and I'd still like it better if the pretend 70s stylings were removed.

Re. retro worship: she's the same age (actually slightly older) as Bowie was when he did Dancing in the Street with Mick Jagger.

fwiw I think creating personas is cool and interesting, even if this seems more calculated than when people have done it in the past. but the music still needs to interest me. anyway I suspect we are mostly all on the same page here.

I have no problem with this either, I just think this album's persona is way less interesting than her previous ones and feels kinda lazy, comparatively.

I guess no one wants to touch this

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

I'm only surprised she didn't direct it

the last album's persona was already pretty bad & uninteresting and the one before that was just like, she dyed her hair and started doing choreography on stage. and before that she wasn't really doing personas at all

lol it's impossible to see Brownstein in that thing with a cowboy hat on and not think Portlandia

"control the narrative" i wish that phrase would die in a fire

i'll probably watch that

xxp
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0J8uXxdZ65Y

I think the persona shtick has been pushed by Clark herself in interviews (though she refers to them as 'archetypes' for each album IIRC); other than that I don't see how changing your visual aesthetic to go with a new direction is particularly unusual? Bowie is an obvious point of reference, of course, but so is Björk, or PJ Harvey, or legions of current female pop singers going through their 'eras'.

But dissonance appears on Daddy’s Home whenever Clark’s louche time-traveling character collides with the political tensions of the present day. It’s odd, for example, that two songs on the album refer to calling “the cops,” or 911, in light of the past year’s uprisings against police brutality.

xp yeah just changing up your visual appearance isn't unusual at all but she's been leaning into it more than just that with this album and the last, kind of playing a character and doing some conceptual stuff with it all, just... not very well

This is such a fun record. I read everything above, mostly negative as usual, but I figured most of the complaints—e.g. there are clumsy and obvious 70s references in the lyrics—aren't things that bother me, and I went for it. I like that the admittedly unsophisticated 70s concept allows her to just straight-up play classic rock/acoustic guitar and make out like doing so is art. Honestly, that is a pleasure to me, her doing that. The production is a marvel. Aural excitement bouncing between one or other of my ears and baps and bops between. She will never be a genius songwriter—who will?—but this is brilliant noise for me right now.

I saw her on that tour with Vanderslice mentioned upthread and was absolutely bowled over by her shredding. She's not the only shredder I know to have run in the other direction from "she's really good at guitar" and I don't blame any of them, "a girl! playing guitar!" has to get super fuckin old in shredder world. but I have found her music since she leaned away from shredosity completely without interest -- self-congratulatory theater-kid stuff, ticks a lot of boxes but emerges as less than the sum of its parts. the new one is sort of the natural progression of this movement, weirdly the sense of there being an auteur calling the shots (which seems to be the story being pushed) feels absent to me -- this record feels like everybody on board put in as many ideas as they could though the way JA works it could just be his very fast-working brain and a lot of long hours at the board. probably had a lot of fun putting it all together but it's kind of a mess. that said imo "down and out downtown" is sweet as hell as long as you don't listen too hard to the lyrics. the drums feel corrected to within an inch of the drummer's life, which is what everybody wants now anyway but detracts from the vibe for me. the vocal distressing...I wish people would get over vocal distressing, we've all had our moments with it but it really doesn't accomplish much now. on the whole not as good at the Feb 77 Swing Auditorium sets by the Dead, those are primo

from the credits it seems like it's mostly just her & antonoff getting lost in the studio together