St. Vincent - MASSEDUCTION (5th album, October 13 2017)

oh cool let's play that dichotomy again

it's a crappy way of putting it, but most of the stuff she's released since after the s/t album does sound like a different artist - Los Ageless could be by anyone really, and New York is almost begging to be used in an episode of some quirky indie comedy-drama.
There's not a lot rubbing up against itself on these tracks, and as such they seem to slip through my ears almost a little too fluidly.
The music, the cover aesthetic, makes me expect a passage on the album "I'm sorry, the old Annie can't come to the phone right now, Why? Oh, 'cause she's dead!"

But...Antonoff produced this record too?
whaaaaaat!!!!

idg the complaints tho, she's been writing strong melodies from day 1, she's a crossover artist, kinda like Byrne

Yeah man.

...she worked with producer Jack Antonoff, whom she connected with over a dinner in Los Angeles. “She was very open about the things in her life,” said Antonoff about the dinner date. “That’s what I was interested in. Continuing to reveal more and more. I said, ‘Let’s go for the lyrics that people will tattoo on their arms.’”

There's a Song Exploder podcast where she talks about working with him too.

cool, I'll check that out!

re new vs old Clark, even if it's in part due to her distinctive vocals, surely most attentive listeners would recognize the new songs as St Vincent songs

idg the complaints tho, she's been writing strong melodies from day 1, she's a crossover artist, kinda like Byrne

― niels, Thursday, September 7, 2017 3:39 PM (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Don't think anyone's complaining about 'strong melodies', rather than a drift into generic songwriting and production.

Have people heard the whole album yet? I would before jumping to conclusions. She might have a couple uber dancy pop singles, but still do the avant pop that she does elsewhere. She's a great guitar player, I hope she didn't put her guitar away for all of them.

Yes it's crappy and reductive to pull it into a dichotomy like that, but, as far as most people who aren't ilxors are concerned, it's a pretty simple way of describing what's going on, and simple ways of describing things can be very useful.

I thought New York was a pleasant enough song, if inconsequential, but that it lacked some of what I think of as SV's USPs - her fucking awesome guitar playing, for one. Probably the biggest one, in fact. I was excited at the idea of their being a new album, though.

Likewise one can only really tell Los Ageless is even by SV because of her voice, which feels like a shame, because I thought there was more to her than just that. But the arrangement / production feels really anonymous to me, just big modern whooshy pop that anyone could sing over. If that's what she wants to do that's fine, but it's not, I don't think at this stage, what I'm interested in from her. That said, I like the way the outro goes quiet and minimal, and the difference in tone between this and NYNY might mean there are some interesting tensions on the album.

As a rule I'm happy for people to move and and find new creative partnerships, and actually, in this case, I felt like the self-titled had taken her relationship with John Congelton as far as it could go. I'm just not excited about the album now like I would have been a few years ago.

woof these songs are bad :/

i want her signature guitar so bad, v cool looking

xpost Very well said; I feel the same way. Both of the singles are basically anonymous in their genericness — and Annie’s voice alone isn’t distinctive or unique enough to turn them into tracks instantly recognizable as St. Vincent’s. Or maybe I just miss the deadpan delivery over her idiosyncratic arrangements and shredding, and projecting these expectations is just very rockist of me? Of course these two songs are not necessarily representative of the remaining 11 tracks but they definitely deflated my excitement for the album.

i saw Annie open for The National many years ago and have followed along ever since and my take on her has never changed: I think she's cool and important and talented and a visionary and I just don't like her music much.

oh well ... my loss!

My reactions to her music are normally aesthetic rather than emotional, if that makes sense. Which is why an aesthetic shift is a big deal if it goes the wrong way for me.

I like the new songs. I wonder if this is sponcon though

https://image.ibb.co/gWGKTw/Screen_Shot_2017_10_09_at_6_14_50_PM.png

her classically minded, sweetly coy 2007 debut Actor

I could understand making a mistake like that if you're an outsider writing about Guided By Voices or someone else with a zillion albums, but St. Vincent has, like, five.

jesus I didn't realize she'd been around that long. in my mind she was always a strictly '10s artist. i went and looked at her discography at went ohhhh yeah! at the cover of Actor. was Love This Giant seriously 5 years ago???

Yeah, she's been around long enough that people originally cared she was friends with Sufjan Stevens...so you know it's been a while.

37 state themed albums ago

and she was in the Polyphonic Spree! bizarre

That's more of a footnote. Hundreds of people were in the Polyphonic Spree.

(Mainly I just wanted to clown on Sufjan's 20-teens irrelevance.)

I will assert that his last album is very good and easily his best as penance for my own sufjan clowning

yea i agree although i can't really listen to it, i like illinois more but carrie & lowell prevented him from becoming stuck in the aughts

seven swans is all time but carrie and lowell is a good contender for best

Another new one. It's very At War With The Mystics.

https://youtu.be/hwFx0ROBf7o

hmm not for me, too concept-y

Good album. Definitely not as instant as the self titled. Love how she uses her voice throughout, some really incredible performances.

pills really reminds me of the stuff she was doing with byrne

CD arriving tomorrow so not bothered d/l the leak

this album is fucking incredible

Listening to this now - New York and Los Ageless didn't turn me on much but I like them a lot better in context. Title track sounds so much like a lost Prince track, it's scary.

yeah, this album seems so much better than the singles in isolation

Her best record to date.

CD arrived

was listening to this earlier, some of it reminded me of bill nelson a bit - obviously the flashy guitar playing but also that particular odd melodic sense and the oblique lyrics

plus also y'know

https://image.ibb.co/jPnQqb/annienelson.jpg

Is this a good choice for first st Vincent then?

I still like Actor the best, but you'll get the idea starting anywhere.

I want to say, give or take, I've liked each album a little less than the next, as she's gone more and more high-concept/arch.

xxp I'd say this is a great choice, but I'd commit to giving the whole album a spin

Pills is odd.. the chorus is horribly kitschy and nothing else is too interesting, but that coda - holy shit, it's incredible

is the song successful if the crash is better than the high?

I've listened to little else in the last 24 hours and I'm fully on-board with this. It's probably her most consistent album yet.

Slow Disco is my current favourite, even though it's way too short. Such a beautiful arrangement.

Anyone else getting Beth Gibbons vibes from Smoking Section? She sounds so much like her when she repeats, "it's not the end".

if concept level is the factor you're going off of, i'd say start with STRANGE MERCY, and if you get into that and enjoy ~high-concept~ music, go into ACTOR and ST. VINCENT and MASSEDUCTION. if ~~high-concept~~ isn't so much your thing, go into MARRY ME.

i think strange mercy is her best ablum by far, but this is good too, about on par with the last one.

I think Actor is still my favourite. There's barely anything between the new one, Strange Mercy and St. Vincent.

She does sound a lot like Beth Gibbons on the “it’s not the end” part and the piano part also sounds like Portishead... it doesn’t seem accidental.

the chorus to "Los Ageless" is also very Portishead

Listening to this for the first time now after seeing a Twitter comment that hinted it was influenced by Art Angels. I don't know how much that is really true, but I'm still liking this quite a bit so far. It seems less mannered and more fun than her previous albums.

tbh bc of like... the media ecosystem, and also instagram, i know this writer is married and lives in a beautiful loft, and when i read that last paragraph about never having to engage with people who dislike you, i thought "wow you sure are married and live in a beautiful loft"

― jolene club remix (BradNelson), Tuesday, January 29, 2019 9:02 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

:-(

Since almost everything StV does professionally is a pose (and therefore a choice) it seems normal to think that the decision to act like a dick was not also deliberate BUT there are a lot of circumstantial, relationship or mental health reasons that someone may be acting badly. Having said that this does seem bad in a very particularly rehearsed way.

this usually boils down, for me, to 'is the artist making good enough art to justify their interview antics'

with st vincent the answer is a massive resounding no, hence i am with the journalist 100%

I would never kill file you, LBI! I don't even know how to do that...

This all weird reasoning imo since the narrator here hasn’t shared anything that makes her sound anything other than maybe wiped out and a bit standoffish and I really don’t know how to take her “do you like doing this?” question, it does not come off on paper as an indicator of anything other than someone who may have just had some recent bad experiences with journalists or simply some shit going on in their life. I have no reason to trust this enough to make a judgement of SV as a person and the level at which one appreciates her art is no reason to judge her more harshly either, I mean come on.

(To put that last point another way: You're right, flappy, it often isn't very simple. But SV's at a level where she could make it simple if she wanted to.)

Is she? I genuinely don't know - she's an amphitheater act, not on a major label, not a household name... the way the music industry is, I don't think there are many artists that can forego interviews or a typical promotional cycle that would make someone like Clark weary w/o letting down their employers and their expectations.

yer right. also, fgti's story about the curveball question is horrifying. xp

there's also the aspect that the entire masseduction rollout (videos, etc.) was based on a sort of sardonic self-awareness of the press cycle, of which that question would be a natural part of

s Clark neared the end of recording, she turned some attention to the next phases—packaging, publicity, performance. She has observed that, when she makes the rounds to local media outlets or on cattle-call press junkets, she is repeatedly asked the same questions, many of them dumb ones. “You become a factory worker,” she said. “When you have to say something over and over, there’s a festering self-loathing. No better way to feel like a fraud.”

She’d made what she was calling an interview kit, a highly stylized short film, which consists of her answering typical questions. She sits in a chair with her legs crossed, in a short pink skirt and a semitransparent latex top before a Day-Glo green backdrop, with a camera and a sound crew of three female models in heels, dog collars, dominatrix hoods, and assless/chestless minidresses. A screen reads, “Insert light banter,” and then Clark reappears, saying, with a strained smile, “It’s good to see you again. Of course I remember you. Yah, good to see you. How’s—how’s your kid?”

There follows a series of questions and answers, with the former presented as text onscreen—generic placeholders:

Q. Insert question about the inspiration for this record.

A. I saw a woman alone in her car singing along to “Great Balls of Fire,” and I wanted to make a record that would prevent that from ever happening again.

Q. Insert question about how much of her work is autobiographical.

A. All of my work is autobiographical, both the factual elements of my life and the fictional ones.

Q. Insert question about being a woman in music.

A. What’s it like being a woman in music? . . . Very good question.

The camera cuts to her interlaced fingers. She wears paste-on fingernails, each with a letter. They spell out “F-U-C-K-O-F-F.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/28/st-vincents-cheeky-sexy-rock

(xp -- also s/"a natural part")

caveat: I have not participated in many interviews in my life, and I was probably a mediocre interviewee and not anyone doing interviews for publication. I've seen a lot of one-on-one and roundtable live interviews -- notably a different thing than one done for publication -- and generally there are two types: the light questioning with extended answers, and ones that are more "transactional"

it seems weird to me that this kind of drops in the middle of the note on how the interview went

Midway through Clark turned to me and asked, with audible hostility, "Do you like doing this?" (There's a long pause in the tape here.) I said something evasive and steered the conversation back to modular synths.

why be evasive? imo that's the basis of why interviews can be an inherently hostile enterprise, it's an unnatural conversation style with no reciprocity. even if you're going to fuck up the answer, reciprocate

yer right. also, fgti's story about the curveball question is horrifying. xp

The question was, "Who's a better kisser? Algernon Featherwilly, or Benjamin Powderbottom?"

Years later I am still traumatized

why be evasive?

Seriously. The obvious answer is "usually, yes." I mean, I've never - in 22 years - had an interview disintegrate into outright hostility (I have had one person hang up on me), but if she's putting it out there, grab it and see what happens.

w/r/t whether SV is at a level to make her music without doing press - or more precisely, doing press she wants to do, when she wants to do it - i mean, i really have no idea how much $ she makes, what kind of financial obligations she has, whether she gives a shit if people buy tickets or not, etc., etc., not to mention the various promotional pressures she feels.

but just generally speaking, i would imagine Annie could either (a) find partners to help her start her own label and release music that way, a la Wilco, or (b) tell labels straight away she wants to control the press stuff, and if they don't like it, they can go sign someone else. i'm quite sure there'd be labels that would love to work with her anyway.

until she does one of those things, she signs up for putting some control of press obligations in someone else's hands.

and she can handle that any way she wants, of course. but taking out her frustrations about it on someone who is just trying to do their job isn't a great look.

i thought "wow you sure are married and live in a beautiful loft"

― jolene club remix (BradNelson), Tuesday, January 29, 2019 2:02 PM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

not my finest moment

― jolene club remix (BradNelson), Tuesday, January 29, 2019 2:02 PM (four hours ago

no this is a keeper

There's literally nothing keeping St. Vincent from saying "I'm just not gonna do press for this record"

Even if her records aren't doing Adele numbers, she's got producer gigs, festival appearances, gear deals, movie syncs in the fuckin Twilight movies ... she's prolly got racks

No, you always have to keep doing press, esp at that level, the artist is a business investment and you can't make decisions like that without having arguments with labels et al.

It's people like Will Oldham who have that luxury

I interviewed her around the summer of 2010 and I just have fond memories of our conversation, tbh.

so having just come from a concert by an artist who was extremely anxious and uncomfortable on stage, and having belatedly realized my wondering if it was some kind of "performance" was both a natural human instinct and ludicrously overanalytical, i'm possibly more inclined than typically towards the theory that ms. clark was having a shitty day and reacted to it by being an asshole.

Maybe so

What’s your excuse for the interviewer posting a weird tell-all on her Tumblr? Was she also just having a shitty day?

Maybe her first shitty day (as an adult!). That last paragraph is something else.

I was fired from my job at one of the major national music magazines because Ozzy didn't like the questions I was asking him and hung up on me. The questions were indeed obtrusive and insipid, which was the name of the game as far as my boss was concerned. To this day, it was the only remotely unsuccessful interview experience I ever had.

My girlfriend at the time was a music publicist, and she believed the situation should have been mitigated by the fact that, being that this was 2003, the entire world knew that Ozzy was an irritable dim bulb (and he surely was taxed by shit Sharon made him do at the time, which was unprecedented by the standards he had known previously). Frankly, my boss (well known in the music press environment for being impossible. over his head, and ignorant of the business he was in) and I hated each other and this was the pretext he needed to axe me. And I was overjoyed to get away from him.

But the bottom line is that it doesn't matter if the interview subject is uncooperative. If you are acting as a professional interviewer, your responsibility is to get the goods. I didn't, and faced the consequences. But Young did get the goods, based on a perfectly serviceable piece by GQ's standards. Yet she is offended that Clark was indifferent and is moved to complain in public.. Will Welch is the new editor at GQ, and he may be charged to keep pace with modern journalism, which Welch very well could believe involves tolerating freelancers complaining in public about a professional interaction that occurred on GQ's behalf—because everybody has to talk about everything in public constantly. It wouldn't have been enough to privately complain to Nasty Little Man, or to Will Welch, or to her spouse in the nice loft or her friends. But if I was Welch, I would not use Young again.

David Bowie and Rob Halford were both indeed incredibly pleasant, thoughtful, generous in conversation.

seems like she's taken the note down

What’s your excuse for the interviewer posting a weird tell-all on her Tumblr? Was she also just having a shitty day?

― fgti's romance (flamboyant goon tie included)

outside of professional music writers, nobody actually cares about the interviewer as far as i can tell

but i can be really out of the loop and i'm prepared to be wrong about this

my main question is "why is this interviewer still using tumblr"

i mean this seems like prime tweetstorm material

if it was a tweetstorm ppl on here would ask why it wasn't a blog post

I mean, when you interview artists for a living, someone asks you like once a month which one was the nicest and who was a real jerk. And the answers - ime, at least - are always boring and disappointing. She should've just saved her SV experience for that.

I quite enjoy it when a writer describes the anti-social behavior of a subject, but that's just me.

There are times where it kind of creates empathy for the anti-social subject-- I always felt kind of sad about Lou Reed's chronic frustration that nobody was interested in all the reading he'd done regarding signal deterioration and buffering re: his guitar tone

Did anybody archive the note? Apparently she's done this before with other profiles.