Goff's Pick of the Week- Strange Mercy by St. Vincent

There is something missing on St. Vincent’s three albums. It’s not emotion; between Annie Clark’s gut wrenching lyrics, her doll like presentation, and her jerking guitar riffs with compression up to eleven, St. Vincent presents all the emotion that a band could need and possibly more. It’s not attitude either, her mild mannered appearance is only a façade underneath which is a fierce animal waiting to be summoned by the sounds of guitars and drums. Having had the opportunity to see St. Vincent live,  it comes down to visual presentation, and while that may be a crappy reason to say that albums as good as Marry Me, Actors, and Strange Mercy are incomplete, anyone who has seen Clark lay down the guitar riff from Strange Mercy’s strongest track Surgeon knows exactly what I mean. Sure, on the album the riff I’m referring to is obviously a guitar, and yes you’ve probably seen someone play guitar before, but I’ll be damned if you’ve ever seen anyone do it exactly like Annie Clark. There is something so disarming about seeing her play as well as she does while singing as well as she does over music that is as good as it is; she executes the demanding guitar parts with a surgical precision and a uniqueness that makes one think that only she could pull it off. This combined with a fascinating light show, St. Vincent puts on a hell of a concert, one of the best I’ve seen all year.  

Without a doubt the girl has talent, having gone to Berklee College of Music for three years, and having toured with The Polyphonic Spree  and Sufjan Stevens, Clark was by no means a new comer to music at the beginning of her solo career. And now, three albums later, Clark shows no sign of stopping or slowing down. Her most recent release, this year’s Strange Mercy, is a FANTASTIC album, worthy of being this weeks Goff's pick. There is a certain duality to Clarks songwriting that presents itself two pronged in the craft of her lyrics and in the duality of her voice and guitar riffs. On the lyrics side you have a struggle between helpless suffering characters on songs like “Surgeon” and “Cruel” starkly contrasted against the empowered take charge girls from songs “Year of the Tiger”, “Cheerleader”, and the title track. The conflict between lyrics and guitar is equally as deep, if not more so. What’s so interesting about her voice and approach to song craft is the blatant lack of emotionality behind her voice. She gives each song the exact same vocal treatment in the same sort of write off way Slaughter-House Five greets death with the repeated phrase “so it goes”. And while this would discredit almost any artist as being insincere, as just going through the motions, or of being flat out bad,  Annie Clark breaths life back into her work with a six string and a lot of creative ingenuity. The emotion is not in her voice, as we are so used to hearing it, it’s played on her Fender, reverberating through amps as opposed to vocal chords. And while this may not be obvious at first, it gives St. Vincent that extra kick, pushing the songs way over the edge into great music territory.