Annie Clark, the flesh-and-blood person behind the alt-rock alter ego St. Vincent, has made a career of hiding behind things, whether it's an affectation or.
There s a scene in Torrey Peters new novel,
Detransition, Baby, where two trans women argue over the enduring legacy of Candy Darling, one of the most memorable stars in Andy Warhol s orbit in late- 60s and early- 70s New York. One character asserts that she was little more than a muse, a blank canvas onto which men like Warhol and Lou Reed (who wrote about her in Candy Says and Walk on the Wild Side ) could project their fantasies: just some helpless languid blonde waiting around for a man to save her and make her famous. In response, the other character lifts her skirt to reveal an enormous, photorealistic portrait of Darling s face tattooed across her thigh. A person s image, when separated from the person, can be tectonic in its meaning or appear as a cheap facsimile: It depends on how many times it s been replicated, the conditions of that replication, and, mostly, whom you ask.
Zackery Michael/Courtesy of the artist
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Daddy s Home (out May 14), Annie Clark s sixth album as St. Vincent, takes the sounds and sleaze of early-1970s New York as its aesthetic backdrop. Zackery Michael/Courtesy of the artist
There s a scene in Torrey Peters new novel,
Detransition, Baby, where two trans women argue over the enduring legacy of Candy Darling, one of the most memorable stars in Andy Warhol s orbit in late- 60s and early- 70s New York. One character asserts that she was little more than a muse, a blank canvas onto which men like Warhol and Lou Reed (who wrote about her in Candy Says and Walk on the Wild Side ) could project their fantasies: just some helpless languid blonde waiting around for a man to save her and make her famous. In response, the other character lifts her skirt to reveal an enormous, photorealistic portrait of Darling s face tattooed
The first 15 seconds of
Daddy’s Home, St Vincent’s sixth solo album, introduce the numerous – and furiously fluctuating – modes of Annie Clark. An old-school honky-tonk piano opens the show, underwritten by unsettling gasps for breath. Then the piano disintegrates and a dirty synth takes over. Clark mimics Mariah Carey with
an intricate vocal riff, before she leads her cavorting ensemble, big-band-style, into the main body of the track. If, on her previous record
Daddy’s Home she is an out-and-out shape-shifter. At first, this unpredictability suggests that there is a freedom about this new era of St Vincent. Over the course of a 14-year career, the guitarist and producer Clark, who grew up in Dallas, Texas, has enchanted both indie and pop fans with her scintillating art rock, and has collaborated with Taylor Swift, David Byrne, Sufjan Stevens and Dua Lipa. With each record, she has taken on a new persona: at the time of her debut, she was a down-to-earth Kate
MASSEDUCTION, which was her most personal since 2014 s self-titled
St. Vincent, which itself beat out the personal stories on 2011 s
Strange Mercy with even more personal stories. They re all so personal! she says, laughing. It s really funny, that that s the currency. Clark calls Exclaim! on rehearsal break in Los Angeles, where she and her band are tightening the screws on the lounging 70s fantasia that premiered on the
SNL stage in April. A world away from the polarizing severity of the Fear the Future tour, this new stage presentation is more evidence no lasers or smoke or jumbotrons that for all its wigs and stylized sepia tones,