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CD review: St. Vincent
St. Vincent
‘Actor’
(4AD)
B+
There’s a great song from good old 1995 by the (currently Austin-based) songwriter Bill Callahan, aka Smog, called “Prince Alone in the Studio.” Broad and epic, with dramatic strings and stately pace, it imagines Prince perfecting a song. (“It’s three a.m. Prince hasn’t eaten in eighteen hours … It’s four a.m./ And he finally gets that guitar track right.”)
One pictures Annie Clark, former axwoman for the Polyphonic Spree and Sufjan Stevens, alone in the studio working on “Actor,” hour after lonely hour, adding layers of guitar, sometimes heavily distorted, sometimes sparkly. (There are a few additional players here and there, but much of the album was played by her.) You picture Clark double tracking woozy vocals, adding blippy drum machines, wordless choral chants and ethereal synths until it’s just right.
This is a dense, busy album disguised as a languid one, alternately beautiful and gritty and too often too fussy by half. It feels and sounds precisely done, the sound perhaps going through her head on the faintly creepy album cover, where Clark resembles a very lifelike android.
Opener “The Stranger” mixes choirs and smeary amp overdrive, a catchy chorus that goes “Paint the black hole blacker” and this chunky riff that sounds shipped in from a whole other song. “Save Me From What I Want” pulls the same choral trick with glassy, rainy guitar over breakbeats and spacey synths. It’s proggy stuff, indebted to (or recalling) such disciplined rock composers as Robert Fripp, Jim O’Rourke or Bjork.
There are straight-forward moments: “Marrow” futzes with a stiff digital funk, “Actor Out of Work” pounds along Krautrock style, while the chilled-out piano ballad “The Party” channels her inner Carole King. But most of the time, when things get too pretty, she crashes the party with some quick-cut noise guitar or deep focus percussion, as on the creepy, soundtracky “The Bed.”
“Actor,” which hits stores tomorrow, performs complicated moves that reward with multiple listens. Like Callahan says of Prince, “And when it’s all complete/ He feels like a hunter on the street.” Wouldn’t be surprised if Clark did, too.
(‘Actor’ listening party, 5 p.m. Tuesday at Mohawk.)
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