St Vincent - s/t (25 February 2014)

well it's certainly less expensive!

Jesus Regret is good

I've listened to this about four times through in the last days and it's really sinking in nicely now. Prince Johnny is especially good.

that said, she still does this thing where some of her melody lines remind me so much of other songs it kind of annoys me. the last song bears an uncanny resemblance to 'you stole the sun from my heart' by MSP and I'm sure there was a track which ripped off the chorus from a well known Supergrass song. St Vincent - secret Britpop fan.

Why is this album so expensive to buy on vinyl? Does it come with a bag of gold dust?

Good question. The few vinyl copies in the shops disappeared almost immediately when the album was first released, and it took a week or two for more to appear because they had to be imported, according to the guy who runs my local record shop. I assumed the price reflected the need to import this stuff, though I know nothing about this business. Nevertheless, my copy (which I think cost £22.99 in the end) sounds pretty good, a nice pressing.

quite reasonable in the US

that's fair enough, but i'm quite surprised and a bit sad that first of all there are so few copies around and that these are so expensive. it'll definitely affect sales for SV, and she deserves them.

Truck Records in Oxford didn't have it, but Head in Leamington Spa did. The guy at Truck mentioned that the embossed gold bits on the front cover was why it was limited edition and a bit pricier than other new releases. It was the gold dust after all!

Apparently the US early pressings were a bit shoddy, but yeah, the UK ones sound great and the gatefold looks lovely.

i bought it on vinyl a couple of weeks ago and it's beautifully packaged. seeing her on saturday, so stoked

lucky, i got ticks for the Cambridge show in Aug.

When it was first available to order here in the US you get the regular vinyl edition or pay $20 more and get a version that came with a single that was shaped like a triangle on gold vinyl. That sold out pretty quickly. I was considering getting that limited edition but shipping was another $15. Didn't want to end up paying $60 for the whole thing, as great as it is. Looking on Amazon.co.uk now there are copies now available for £12 but they're all from US sellers.

I think I'd managed not to hear any St. Vincent before (maybe the 1st album way back?) but I went to see her tonight and she puts on a hell of a show. Best use of a guitar I've heard in ages. Listening to the album now and it doesn't have the same energy so far.

i was looking out for you seandalai, shame we missed each other. also thought the live show was astounding. along with the s/t one you should also check out the 'actor' album.

i was pleasantly surprised by the support act, Arc Iris, too. Sort of jazzy folky prog from Low Anthem's Florence Wallis.

she's one of my favorite live performers, certainly

* Not Florence Wallis - Jocie Adams.

My new favourite bit on this album is on Huey Newton on the section that starts 'Hale Bopp, Hail Mary...' simply gorgeous

Her latest dispatch:

hello from a nyc coffeeshop amidst inchoate autumn. too pretentious a way to start a bulk email? fair enough. it is 9/11 today. last night, after long rehearsal (refine! rebuild! reuse! recycle!), i attended a party meant to celebrate "fashion" where i felt woefully out of place. i, however, am not one to look a gift horse full of champagne in the mouth. so i grabbed a couple and began chatting up the most interesting looking person in the room. mike. a retired NYPD policeman formerly of the 13th precinct, guarding an empty table adorned with pop-culture detritus, now hired to do private security at functions where people like me feel woefully out of place. he was quick to laugh, easy to talk to, and could tell a story that had me alternating between stitches and tears. like a benevolent boxer who knows when to jab with humor and then land a right hook of poignance. (my father taught me how to box, which i had to stop for obvious guitar-hand-related reasons.) i asked him the questions every retired police officer must get: "what's the craziest thing you've ever seen?" "have you ever been shot at?", etc. he said his favorite part of being on the force was being able to help people. starting the healing process. soon enough, he got to telling me about his experience of 9/11. how a female police officer from his precinct was the first to call in that a plane had hit the first tower. how the dispatch said, "what? a train?!" she perished that day while saving new yorker's lives. how, when he and the other men and women in uniform raced down to the towers, pedestrians cheered them on, even chasing their squad cars to throw in water and protein bars. he said that he used to fret about money and retirement plans and 401ks, but that after 9/11, he realized the only thing that mattered is being with the people you love and being happy. so cheers to you, mike. cheers to you all. xx ac

Despite the s/t threatening to eclipse her previous career, I decided to dig out Love This Giant for the first time in a while. And do you know what? It's great! Like really great - well at least the St Vincent songs are.

Optimist is great

Yup, I particularly like that one, and Ice Age is great too.

Two new tracks; so far I prefer "Sparrow" a little, because more primitive & grunty, but "Pieta" 's chorus & rhythm sounds are good also
http://www.wonderingsound.com/listen-2-new-st-vincent-tracks-pieta-sparrow/

i don't really like those tracks, unfortunately. my favorite by her is still "actor" but i think it's because i had a really good listening experience, lost driving through winding wooded roads in bucks county late at night. i drove at a creeping pace because i am terrified of hitting deer over there. the conscientiousness was sort of meditative, and the music facilitated that experience.

Oh, I like these a lot. Actor is my favorite too, but this year's album and these new tracks run a very close second.

Actor has bigger highs but song-for-song the s/t is best.

I'd also rank this one just behind Actor too. Strange Mercy has some unbelievable highs (Surgeon, Cruel, Northern Lights) but last time I listened to it the second half kind of dragged a bit until it got to Year of the Tiger which is an amazing album closer. Marry Me is solid but definitely has that feel of her only hinting at what she's capable of.

Yeah after Marry Me I have a hard time having a favorite, which is mostly a backhanded compliment? They all have highs and lows and none of them 'the best' to me. I think she can still hit a higher note still.

Strange Mercy remains my favorite song of hers.

didn't like Strange Mercy at all (except Cruel)

Bit unfortunate, having the same name as the Bill Murray movie.

odd that she seems to have chosen "give me your loves" as the promotional track for this record (the one she played on letterman etc.). it's one of the strangest, most angular and least immediately likable IMO.

yeah not the best one at all.

it kind of slips over the "pretentious" threshold IMO, something a lot of her songs threaten to do but most don't

Hope she'll do a Deluxe version of this album or the next with a concert DVD. SXSW 2014 set was incredible sound & vision.

She forbids recording at her shows, more successfully than not, or so it seemed before I gave up checking YouTube.

Latest newsletter:

here we go bouncing into a new year. maybe less like a bounce and more like an 80's national lampoon's station wagon with suitcases bulging and strapped to the top. you stop suddenly, and everything comically comes crashing and spilling out in front of you. amid the shuffling and scrambling to shove your unmentionables back into the splayed, cracked cases, you stop for a moment, look at a trinket or talisman of the year past, and remember a real moment. a moment you had forgotten because, in the words of the great david bowie, "my brain felt like a warehouse/it had no room to spare/i had to cram so many things to store everything in there…" right now, a few weeks past an abrupt reckoning%, i am clear-headed, quiet, looking out on a beautiful new zealand day^ and absolutely drowning in the milk of human kindness. thank you for making 2014 the most insane, feral#, and rewarding year of life. wishing everyone everything your heart desires*. xx ac in auckland

%being off tour for the first time in 11 months
^a day which peter jackson himself couldn't have dreamed up any lovelier, and yes, yes…i am BACK on tour
#my mother made me promise not to climb any more scaffolding
*unless you're a psychopath

annie, you're great and i love your music and everything but please quit with all the assumptive Innocent Smoothies 2nd-person monologuing. cheers!

Best Alternative Music Album Grammy Earns More Annie-Type Prose:

2.9.2015

in 2007, i signed to beggars banquet records. i was living in dallas, texas in my childhood bedroom at the time, which i had fashioned into a makeshift studio in order to record some of what would end up being my debut album "marry me."

the first days of touring my own songs and as "st. vincent" are very vivid. in early 2007, in anticipation of the release of my record, my (much beloved) agent put me on the road as solo support for jolie holland and midlake. he saw potential in me, but rightfully, thought i needed to get my live act together. get comfortable playing for people. get road-tested. like most of the rest of my career, it was a trial by earth, wind, and fire.

i was performing solo; just my voice, a guitar through an array of effects pedals, a "stomp board" -- a homemade device i made out of a piece of plywood and a contact microphone that i ran through a bass EQ pedal, and a keyboard. i thought the keyboard looked unmysterious on it's own, so i designed a lighted wooden enclosure to go around it. my brother-in-law helped me build it in his garage. it weighed a gazillion pounds and gave me splinters to carry, and i don't think anyone was under any illusion that there was anything but a keyboard inside it. neither the first nor the last in a series of hilariously ill-fated ideas.

january 2007, i borrowed my father's station wagon and drove 12 hours from dallas to frozen lincoln, nebraska to open for jolie holland (what a voice) at a half-full 150 capacity carpeted club. i believe the compensation was $250/gig but it could have been as much as $500 -- more $ than i'd ever seen for a gig for sure and guaranteed, no less! in my memory, this midwestern jolie tour dovetailed right into opening the midlake tour. they were out in support of their excellent record, "the trials of van occupanther" and were the sweetest good texas boys you could ever hope to meet. the drummer of midlake, mackenzie smith, would later prove to be a great collaborator, playing on actor, strange mercy, and st. vincent.

on this tour, i'd enlisted my dear friend, jamil, to come and sell merch and help do the long drives. we'd just played a show in detroit and while we'd been inside, a blizzard had swept through and covered the stationwagon in snow and ice. it was treacherous. jamil, who always had some incredible hustle going, hired a homeless man named larry to dig the stationwagon out of the snow. (in college, he had a gold lexus, stripped it of the good parts, and resold it. when i asked if he was sad to see it go, he said, "girl, they think they bought a lexus but they bought a corolla.") i'll never forget driving out of bombed out-detroit, apocalyptic at 1 AM. interstate 94 tense and quiet, jamil trying to make sure we didn't crash or stall on the icy road.

i have eaten years of veggie subway sandwiches on highways 10-90, stayed at a super 8 motel behind a kansas federal prison, peed in cups in dressing rooms when there was no bathroom, gotten eaten alive by bedbugs at a cincinnati days inn. i would not trade a single highway or city or moment or person i met for anything. i have loved it all.

http://cdn.stereogum.com/files/2015/02/StV.jpg

Love an Annie to death but what a weird fucking statement

seems in character: earnest yet clinical, detail-oriented, a little strange

that last one wasn't so bad in a 'started from the bottom(ish), look at me now' kind of way. but i remember the (by far) lowest point of SV's Cambridge showin the UK, with this whole routine where Annie 'supposed' things about the collected histories of the audience: 'When you were young, you used to trap insects and pull their wings off just to see what would happen' (or something like that), and I don't know if it was a cultural misunderstanding but it all fell so flat, with just a few nonplussed giggles coming from an otherwise silent audience.

idgi -- what's weird about that statement? she's just talking about her experiences?

I feel as if she's positioning her former "small-business model" in a negative light in opposition to her current blessed big box indie model. The surprise ending! "I loved it all." Like, if only all my favourite bands could be making $500 a night and staying in motels.

ah ok
that makes sense
bedbugs aren't a one-night only affair either, they'll stowaway in a corner of your bag and follow you forever

I mean

I barely want to have this conversation, I feel unmixed pleasure about her Grammy win. But I have been having larger issues with big biz indie, both as audience and participant, ethically and aesthetically. And as it is difficult for me to discern what is or is not coloured by professional jealousy, I generally save this shit for my lucky therapist.

My personal rule is that if somebody else is setting up your gear for you, you should probably think about breaking up the band. And if there's an in-ear monitor? cancel the tour immediately. Nobody wants to see or hear that.

the homeless man thing was a little weird but meh

we also need a veggie sub rate in order to understand just how many veggie subs she ate! what if the appropriate veggie sub rate that she's referencing is 60 veggie subs per second?! that would be an award worthy number of veggie subs! give her the golden sub!

you folks are harsh