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

According to my Facebook feed, St Vincent’s core audience is now “Berklee jazz professors”

her lyrics being as bad they are as on "the melting of the sun" is nothing new though, see "pills", "digital witness", etc.

According to my Facebook feed, St Vincent’s core audience is now “Berklee jazz professors”

Wait, really?

That’s based on the one dude raving about her SNL performance, to be fair

one said she’s a minx this one time.

obv i still can’t get over that thread origin story, everyone else since then is just pantomiming and shadow casting.

Dana Jel Pey (DJP) at 8:29 5 Apr 21

According to my Facebook feed, St Vincent’s core audience is now “Berklee jazz professors

she's definitely been on the guitar magazine radar for a minute

I like the layering of the guitars with the weird bends in the bridge of "Melting of the Sun" - that's a cool effect. song is ok otherwise, I prefer her with more energy

She’s always pushing uncommon aesthetic choices in her sound, but I don’t care for the specific aesthetic she going for this time and honestly, it sounds like she doesn’t either.

I appreciate the commitment from these two singles and performances so far but it’s a very niche sort of style that only a dozen of people might even want to hear revived. It’s like retelling a joke and killing it in the process.

her sound this time is just throwing a 70s aesthetic over her usual sound, like the bassline on "pay your way in pain" is the same sort of thing she's done plenty of times before (like "rattlesnake") but she's got electric piano and some backing vocalists over the top this time to make it sound 70s

she's the worst

I contend that musicians adjusting to "having been lauded" can be disorienting to them as songwriters, and they sometimes their subsequent work suffers from self-ironizing and self-critique. It's like a mid-career crisis. I'm really happy that tUnE-yArDs emerged from this wilderness of confusion this year

I'll give her this, it's certainly an idiosyncratic response to her dad getting out of prison

wait what

https://www.nylon.com/entertainment/st-vincent-detailed-daddys-home-in-an-interview

er, just read the original interview it's referencing

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/mar/04/st-vincent-id-been-feral-for-so-long-i-was-sort-of-in-outer-space

fgti makes an interesting point, although I don't know how closely it applies to St. Vincent. It makes me wonder about a thread, "Musicians whose music was damaged by prior acclaim/success".

She discusses his incarceration, the delusions of love – and why she remains as perverse as ever

lol, this subhed just makes me think of the chris fleming routine about her. "those aren't freaks, st. vincent. those are attractive people with heavily-vetted idiosyncrasies"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugm_QuQ5RbY

This was/is A Thing over the last decade or so; putting on a blonde wig and becoming a new character, invariably based in New York. In Bat For Lashes' case she was 'Pearl' I'm sure there were others.

"Perhaps Pearl fitted better in New York than I did. I think Pearl was my way to deal with the disappointment of New York not being what I thought it was going to be. And so she was kind of like an art project I created, by putting on a blond wig and changing my face with makeup and dressing up and taking pictures quite privately in Brooklyn at night-time. She represents a night-time, underground, quite dark and debauched side of me."

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/acid-factory/images/e/eb/Pearl.jpg

She has never been a stoner.

from the guardian piece

you don't say

^^ Oh my, I somehow forgot about the 'Pearl' nonsense from BFL (that album was good, tough).

Same brand of wig.

I remember one show that was mostly great, but she kept going into these ridiculous long, pre-scripted monologues that kept killing the momentum.

Arhhh yes, this happened when I saw her and it was very please stop now.

Between the s/t and Masseduction I can't think of an act for whom my enthusiasm dropped so severely from album to album; not since the days of Animal Collective at least.

Loved Actor, thought "Cruel" was great, S/T was very near the top of my EOY ballot for the year. Even enjoyed the Byrne collab quite a lot. Other than the monologues, the live show was fantastic. I was a fan.

But Masseduction felt off - something false, a little pretentious and irritating about it, like those live monologues birdistheword mentioned upthread. Something about it was trying too hard, like a guest at a party trying to impress people by making grand, outlandish claims about themselves. There was something "cocainey" about it (not that I'm insinuating anything about SV at all, it just came off that way). The humility and nuance of Actor was all but gone, replaced, ironically, with an actorly persona.

Not so much in the music as the execution, I can't get into the recent stuff for much the same reasons I can't get into Lana Del Rey. I'm totally into performers adopting personae to augment their music and to find new angles into their own style, but with SV all it seems to do is obfuscate the artist herself (who is interesting) with a less interesting veil.

it's funny - this seems to be the minority opinion in general but mine is the exact opposite of that (didn't like the early albums at all, think masseduction is by far the best thing she's ever recorded). haven't gotten into this yet/may never, but only because I don't like the music it's trying to pastiche

I don't think that sonically it's a tremendous leap from what she's done before, but I'm having trouble separating the music from the image. If I were to hear the song on its own, would I still be thinking "Hmm, sounds like Eurythmics parodying Fame-era Bowie parodying sixties blue-eyed soul"? Or would I think it sounds like St Vincent being St Vincent?

Maybe too early to tell and I should reserve judgement till I hear the album. I didn't love Strange Mercy save for a couple of songs, and even the S/T had a few which actively annoyed me.

Masseduction is great

I really like masseduction myself

Same. Actor and the S/T are my favourites but Masseduction didn't seem like a dip in quality at all. Based on her latest singles that dip is coming.

I really like what she did on marry me, thought actor was ok, skipped to masseduction and really liked it a lot. It seems v consciously performative in some ways (by which i mean not stream-of-conscience or like, rawly emotive?), but I think it goes off really well.

I have no opinion yet of what she’s doing now, yet, I’ve not heard it. As a type she’s always come off to me as “very-smart drama kid,” which sounds dismissive but I sorta just mean— that’s the only heuristic I have for what seems to be going on.

Same. Actor and the S/T are my favourites but Masseduction didn't seem like a dip in quality at all. Based on her latest singles that dip is coming.

― kitchen person, Wednesday, April 7, 2021 10:38 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

here comes the new jersey thread

never have liked st. vincent, but am always willing to give her a chance, because women in music yeah. this new song sounds like 70s joni mitchell made by someone who has never actually heard any 70s joni mitchell; only had it poorly described to them by a different person who is not very articulate and knows very little about how music is recorded.

listening to "pay your way in pain" now and jfc. this is just bad. what even is this music?

playing the other song again. kind of fascinated by how terrible it is.

does anyone remember when jewel went all teeny bopper pop and then when the album failed, she said it was an ironic post-modern artistic statement? feels like annie may be setting the table for one of those. but i hope not.

That Jewel album debuted at #2 and went gold, which isn't really "failing"

still, isn't a Jewel going gold a downgrade?

Well.

https://www.emmamadden.com/post/st-vincent-told-me-to-kill-this-interview

....I don't know if I can bear to read the actual interview, but this aggressive press management a la Chance is not at all surprising

it's kinda hard to understand why she wanted it killed so badly. did she think that just not answering when asked about her views on prison abolition etc. was a bad look? but i don't think she really handled that badly. being all 'i don't want to get into politics' is a much better look than offering up some very poorly thought out political view. otherwise she just comes across the same way she usually does (a little annoying) with it seeming a bit weird how uninterested she is about talking about her dad when that was a big part of the PR for this album etc. but like not any worse than usual or anything

yeah, i don't get why she would want it pulled, what an ultimately innocuous interview

I thought I had done a not-so-good job the night before. I ended the call thinking I hadn’t asked the right questions. St. Vincent and I didn’t feel like a good match in conversation

Agreed.

maybe she should just stop doing press since it seems to make her miserable

I like her answer about Greta Garbo, i mean for a standard pre-album release phone interview there's some good stuff in here!

I get the feeling that she and her publicists have read the room on the backstory of her father getting out of prison, realized that didn't land well, and now regret it.

as good a guess as any

really shitty of st. vincent, not terribly surprised

but also that was a pretty poorly conducted and awkward interview, you have to have that sense when someone has "closed the door" on a certain line of questioning, you're not going to get what you want out of them and pursuing it further will just cause them to shut down

I get the feeling that she and her publicists have read the room on the backstory of her father getting out of prison, realized that didn't land well, and now regret it.

― akm, Monday, April 26, 2021 11:27 AM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

i hadn't thought of that but i bet this is totally what happened

omg went to prison for a penny stock pump and dump, how incredibly Highland Park

if one were to 'consolidate the influences of their parents', would one then owe a lower emotional interest?

This oughtn't account for much as it's a personal feeling and you don't know me / can't get inside my head etc, and also I can be wrong and maybe regret it when reading this again in a few years' time... but I've realised I can't seem to be able to push play on a St Vincent album since forever, because my BS detector keeps suggesting to me she may really be a bit of an entitled prat, which is also how I basically came to feel about one of her role models i.e. Prince. With both of their musics, it all seems to scream, "Me, Me, Me" in my face; their PR demeanors, to go by this latest article on StV, also seem very alike. I had grown tired of her attention-getting shticks over the years - could be interviews, album cover photos, something in the live presentation - so much so that half a single interview would be enough to put me off having a listen to a new album of hers until the next one. "Contrived" is the operative word. Which all is to say that this latest thing hasn't really surprised me. Some work, too much work that stands in the way of my simple willing to have a listen in order to find out what she does - not who she is, or wants to project how she wants to be perceived.

I'd like to know if anyone is with me on this, or whether my intuition about Annie Clark is terribly off the mark.

If anything, the interviewer should be embarrassed for being ill prepared and awkward for the interview. Can't say I see a reason why the St. Vincent team would be so against this, at least nothing worth the bad press that comes with trying to have it killed.

but also that was a pretty poorly conducted and awkward interview, you have to have that sense when someone has "closed the door" on a certain line of questioning, you're not going to get what you want out of them and pursuing it further will just cause them to shut down

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Monday, April 26, 2021 12:29 PM (nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I mean, probably why the "pursuing it further" happened close to the 30-minute mark

(also, don't most major artist PRs have a stated "don't ask questions about _____" policy going in? or is this just at the megacelebrity level?)

interviewer def. should have dropped it, dunno what she thought she was going to get. Also would it kill interviewers to ask directly about the music? fucking hell. so tired of this type of interview with musicians.