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

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

that "who's your daddy" ad is cool. very evocative of an era. graphic design has such a time machine element to it when the pastiche is seamless, even more so than fashion.

Are they really releasing it on 8-track(?)

wow, imagining listening to this album in a diner, with a coffee circle stain on the table! that would be exactly like it used to be, wow

tbh though i'm kind of an advertisement hater

it's how i resist the man

in the 19th century, nostalgia was considered a disease.

in the 20th, a disease of the bourgeoise. the height of decadence. but i can't help liking period aesthetics. not usually when it's too fussy. but like, my kitchen table is danish and from the 50s and it's my favorite thing. i am sitting at it now, swooning.

teakship

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.

one of the worst developments in the history of rock music

i'm going to give this another shot tonight.

that movie is some rattle and hum ass shit

another beguiling puzzlebox from rock's most fascinating trickster

That Slate review is weird in that the reviewer seems to be actively trying to view the album as a "singer-songwriter" album for some reason? The whole thing reads like, "Despite knowing St. Vincent isn't a good lyricist while enjoying many other aspects of her music, I focused almost entirely on the lyrics when I listened to this album, so my opinion of it is pretty much totally informed by how I felt about the lyrics." Personally I've listened to the album a couple times now and never once felt like I was being asked to pay more attention to the lyrics than I would when listening to any other St. Vincent album.

Anyway, I like this album a lot more than I was expecting to after reading what she said about it being a retreat from "angularity." Mainly I appreciate it because I'm about the same age as St. Vince and I've always really romanticized the idea of my parents' life in the decade before I was born (i.e. the 70s), and I think at least part of the idea here was to create an album/aesthetic/persona that brings her version of that romanticized vision to life. It's a superficial dream version of her dad's world pre-her.

I hadn't really listened to her stuff before, but did check out this album (the commentary made me curious) – it definitely didn't strike me as a super "focus on the lyrics" kind of album. (It also didn't strike me as having much in the way of songs, but that's another story...)

I could still do with less of the ***70s*** stylings but this live version of 'Down' is better for being slightly looser.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vi7hhX_yn5Y

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.

so wait we're not supposed to call 911 now

we caved and called 911 the other day but only because there was a dog in a hot car

misread that as 'a hot dog in a car'.

from the soundtrack of Minions: The Rise of Gru
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_340Lsodug

What a peculiar soundtrack. It's a coherent project - e.g. it's not a bunch of licensed tracks, it was recorded as a single thing - but it has Thundercat and Phoebe Bridgers etc covering light rock and disco from the 1970s. And it was recorded two years ago (the film was held back because of the COVID pandemic). Perhaps they thought it would be the next Guardians of the Galaxy, but hipper. It only got to #192 in the US charts. But there has long been a cross-over between children's entertainment and the avant-garde so perhaps it's not that unusual.

Earlier generations had "pre-war" and "pre-Nixon shock" and "pre-Apollo" etc, my generation has "pre-dot.com bust", "pre-9/11", "pre-great crash", "pre-COVID", and it's hard to keep up. This soundtrack was devised post-great crash, pre-COVID, during a time when travel bloggers were still on an upwards trajectory. A totally different world.

I was going to say "when will she launch an NFT" but it seems that the island chain of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines has actually beaten her. As has MIA, who isn't a landmass, but instead an ordinary 47-year-old human woman. Saint Vincent and the Grenadines doesn't have a regular army, but if push came to shove my money is on the island chain just because they have numbers on their side. Even if she has double-tap and HEAT ammo St Vincent can only engage at most two targets in a single turn. But perhaps she could funnel the enemy into a choke point.

According to Wikipedia "each year, approximately 1169 males and 1224 females reach military age, as estimated in 2010" in Saint Vincent, so I suppose the ultimate question is "can St Vincent kill more than 2,393 people in less than a year without sustaining lasting injuries herself". If the answer is "no" military action would be futile.

Last night I watched The Nowhere Inn. Every viewer seems to have their own personal tolerances for self-reflexive stories, so this is bound to be beyond the pale for a lot of people. I can also imagine that real-life events with Sleater-Kinney, and St. Vincent's slight decline in acclaim and fascination, might darken some of the back story for some people.
I found the first 75% (rockumentary parody) mostly funny, and the last 25% (Persona/Hour of the Wolf nightmares about artistic futility and loss of identity) were not bad. A lot of the self-deprecating stuff about St. Vincent's less-than-massive fame might strike someone who isn't familiar with her less as humility than a reason not to watch.

this is a fun video - Annie just chatting about guitar stuff with Matt Sweeney. can't say I've listened to her music all that much but she really has an interesting approach to the instrument:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrMgXPLwc9o

oh that's cool! even if he spelled her name wrong :)