St. Vincent's new sound mixes subversion with a contagious dance groove
The last song that Annie Clark wrote for "Masseduction," the new St. Vincent album, was the title tune. The track begins with a stuttering percussion loop and a girlish soprano chanting something indecipherable.
Soon a booming bass loop and brittle guitar riff are added, and Clark is muttering about "a punk-rock romantic slumped on the kitchen floor." One can only imagine what happened to leave that romantic sprawled on the linoleum, but whatever the specifics, it's all a part of the "mass seduction" that Clark is soon wrestling with on the disco chorus.
The tension between the infectious dance-floor groove and the subversive guitar, between the giddy vocals and the unsettling lyrics, is indicative of the whole album's friction and appeal. It's a new sound for Clark, who performs under the name St. Vincent, and another step forward for an artist who started out as an indie-rocker, became a David Byrne collaborator and now seems on the cusp of pop stardom. The title song, like the rest of the album, conjures the hard-to-resist pleasures of a hedonistic pop culture while also hinting at its dangers.
"That song is really a summation of the whole record," Clark says by phone from Los Angeles. "The characters in the song appear elsewhere in the record: the punk-rock romantic; the black saint and the lady, which is a Mingus reference; the boatman, which is a Nick Cave reference; Lolita, which is a Nabokov reference; the beautiful bride and the Christian virgins. They populate a world that can't turn off what turns it on."
She repeats that phrase, "I can't turn off what turns me on," again and again on the contagious, beat-happy chorus. The line implies that perhaps she should turn it off before she ends up slumped on the floor herself, but she just can't help herself; it feels so good. And that dilemma is reinforced by the music, the kind of preprogrammed dance music that hipsters often sneer at but that is so immediately gratifying you can't bring yourself to turn it off.
"I think of that phrase as not only a desperate statement, but also a defiant one," Clark explains. "The desperate part of it is, 'I can't turn it off, even though I know it's not good for me.' The defiant part is, 'I can't turn it off and so what?' "
The new album is a collaboration between Clark and Jack Antonoff, who co-wrote five of the 13 tracks and produced the whole project with her. Antonoff, the lead guitarist for the band fun., performs solo under the name Bleachers but is best known for co-writing and producing hits for Taylor Swift and Lorde. He's an unexpected partner for someone who has worked with such outsiders as Byrne and Sufjan Stevens, but it works. Clark takes Swift's effervescence and pumps it full of doubt and irony without losing its charm.
"I'd just met Jack and I didn't really know that much about him," Clark recalls, "but I knew he was the right person for this project, because we had the same goals for the record. He brings out the best in people, because he's incredibly generous, and he makes me feel very safe to go anywhere I want to go."
The theme of mass seduction is explored on such songs as "Pills," a catalogue of all the ways drugs have infiltrated our lives sung in a nursery-rhyme melody over a stomping techno-rock groove, and "Sugarboy," a confession that sexual desire can all too easily mutate into a "crush on tragedy" that turns her into "your pain machine." Also built atop a hypnotic, microchip pulse is "Los Ageless," a portrait of Hollywood as a world of "unwritten memoirs," "sunset superstars" and "girls in cages playing their guitars." Submit to that mass seduction, and you'll end up wondering, "How can anybody have you and lose you and not lose their minds?"
The lost lover in that song and in such songs as "New York" and "Slow Disco" may refer to Clark's romance with British supermodel Cara Delevingne, a relationship that became fodder for London's tabloids. Or maybe not; Clark's not saying. She has always distanced her personal self from her public self, most obviously by adopting the stage name St. Vincent, but also by pairing every clue in her songs with a counter-clue that disputes the reliability of the first one. On the other hand, she won't object to how you interpret a song.
"I use my own experience," she admits, "but I often don't know how I think or what I feel until I write a song, until I check in. It's all very first-person, very heart-on-sleeve, but it's not a blow-by-blow account of what actually happened. I don't mind if people assume it's me in the song. As long as their ears are open and they're enjoying it, as long as it seeps into their life, I don't really care."
When this Texas-raised, Brooklyn-based singer-guitarist performs as St. Vincent, she'll divide her show into two acts, as if it were a play. The first act will be her earlier songs presented in "totally new versions." After an intermission, she'll present the new songs from "Masseduction," music that you may find hard to turn off, because no matter how disturbing it might be, it will probably turn you on.