St. Vincent, Strange Mercy
Reviewed by: Christian Hagen
St. Vincent, aka indie musician Annie Clark, has always had a voice of velvet beauty, a soft, sensuous tenderness in her singing that has remained, in many ways, the only constant in her career as a solo artist.
Her debut, Mercy Me, gained notice for its dramatic uses of classical instrumentation, with thunderous symphonies and subdued piano ballads. However, that album’s follow-up, Actor, found significantly more use for unusual electronic experimentation, sounds sometimes too grating to really carry a song, ranging from distorted saxophones to squealing guitars.
In the transition, her elevated beauty seemed missing, supplanted by half-baked, or perhaps over-baked, ideas. The question was raised whether she could return to her simpler songwriting focus or whether she would continue delving into ever-stranger territories.
Strange Mercy, her latest, answers this question with an unexpected third option: Rather than returning to humanity or getting lost in a machine, Clark has discovered a way to bring the humanity into the machine, creating a fusion of the best qualities from both her previous sonic identities and melding them into something extraordinarily moving, even brave.
For all the aforementioned sweetness of her vocals, Clark’s never used them in quite the same way she does on “Chloe in the Afternoon.” Here, perhaps channeling her inner Bjork, her strained and twisted singing becomes another instrument on the stage, never quite taking the forefront. The tight gasps at the ends of lines in her first verse are like the sounds of fingers sliding on a guitar’s strings. The rhythmic near-chanting of the chorus dances like fingers on the keys.
Clark takes many forms throughout Strange Mercy, appropriately travelling in and out of light and dark, pretty and harsh. “Surgeon,” one of the album’s best songs, begins smoothly, her presence calling out like a chanteuse in a darkened club, before the guitars and vocal layers compound through the chorus, the song building to a rather shrill but somehow still enjoyable keytar solo that concludes the piece.
Clark certainly isn’t the first to find the proper balance between traditional instruments and computers, but her style is still indelibly clear throughout, taking surprising turns that, unlike those she attempted on Actor, add to a sense of cohesion, the explosions like that at the end of “Northern Lights” manic but contained and logical, like Mozart.
The album’s title track is similarly diametric, with a calm ballad bolstered by distant synths growing into a rocking second half, grounded in an unusually aggressive lyric: “If I ever meet that/dirty policeman who roughed you up/oh, I don’t know what.”
The almost deranged complexity of “Neutered Fruit” is startling, rhythmically confusing, and more than a little trippy, but its gentle intentions win out, keeping the listener planted firmly in place as the song dances about a wild field.
It’s interesting, considering the album’s relative success at bridging the best elements of Clark’s past, that the song that is most similar to her earlier, more muted tones, “Champagne Year,” is probably the weakest arrangement here. On its own, it might survive for its heartening restraint, but in the context of the rest of Strange Mercy, it’s a bit too low-key to be memorable. Cutting it and moving directly to “Dilettante” would have been a smart maneuver.
That said, the slowed momentum is not enough to halt Strange Mercy’s grand journey. It’s refreshing to hear a song, in this case “Year of the Tiger,” that clearly belongs at an album’s conclusion, perfectly encapsulating the musical milieu of the album that precedes it while offering a sense of closure and wonder.
The album’s title feels prescient; Clark has found a very different avenue for her particular brand of grace, but it’s still all-too-easy to embrace, to find joy and misery even in the unique angles and divergent techniques she uses to express her soulfulness. With Strange Mercy, Clark reaches into the digital world and pulls out a spirit, an intangible power that is no less real.