23-year-old Annie Clark comes off a bit like the bookish girl in a teen comedy who suddenly and unexpectedly blooms before our very eyes into a self-assured but still razor-witted glamor girl. When she opened for Midlake here in Minneapolis a couple of months back, she took the stage in white canvas shoes, black tights, a long sweater, and glasses straight off of Madeleine Ferguson, Laura Palmer's shy, awkward cousin from Twin Peaks. In that show, Maddy signaled her rejection of her pre-defined role by crushing those '80s-riffic glasses, but Clark, who goes by the nom de guerre St. Vincent, doesn't seem so much interested in destroying the markers of a role as consuming them wholesale and then twisting and re-imagining them in her own way.
Album opener "Now, Now" begins with Clark explaining what she's not: your mother's favorite dog, the carpet you walk on, one small atomic bomb, or, in fact, anything. "Now, Now" echoes some of Kate Bush's florid and wanton arrangements, but what makes St. Vincent considerably more than just a conglomeration of her obvious influences is her fascination with language's double meanings and levels of deception. "Jesus Saves, I Spend" takes a simple play on words and stretches it out into an entire song: "While Jesus is saving," she sings, "I'm spending all my days / In backgrounds and landscapes / with the languages of saints." She strings out this structure through the entire song, playing with the notion of saving as inaction versus wasting as activity. She pulls similar tricks in other songs: "Your Lips Are Red" rests on the tilt between reading and drawing, red/read and drawn/drawing as homophones, and the repeated refrain, "Your skin's so fair it's not fair." The song is throbbing and vicious—if nothing else, Clark knows how to play the threatening/alluring card almost frighteningly well.
When all these threads—religious ambivalence, wordplay, seduction, defiance—all come together, as on the outwardly romantic but inwardly conflicted piano ballad, "Marry Me," the result is one of the most subtly layered and finest drawn songs you'll hear all year. "Oh John, come on," she breathes through the oft-quoted bridge, "let's do what Mary and Joseph did / without the kid." It's the most obviously clever song here, but none the worse for it.
You'll either play "Marry Me" or the Hamlet-referencing, wartime lament/stop "Paris is Burning" for your friends. The latter is simultaneously harrowing and jazzy, with a watermark of '20s swing and torch-singing imprinted underneath its slinky, cabaret skin. When she performed it live, the arrangement fell away, revealing a skeletal track twice as fiery and no less compelling, Clark pounding an amplified foot stomp board for emphasis. Even when she backs off a bit, as on the Astrud Gilberto-esque bossa nova of "Human Racing" or the Nina Simone-ish "What Me Worry?" her wit and personality still shine bright enough to set her apart. Marry Me leaves little doubt that Clark is a serious talent who's only begun to show what she's capable of.
COMING UP: St. Vincent with Scout Niblett. Tuesday, July 24. First Avenue. 8 pm. 21+. $10.
Video of St. Vincent performing "Bang Bang" at SxSW.
Last Updated: Thursday, August 16, 2007 at 11:34 AM
