St Vincent - St Vincent album review & St Vincent live @ O2 Academy Shepherds Bush 20/02/14 review

St Vincent - St Vincent album review

After collaborating with David Byrne in 2012 for the fantastic Love This Giant, Annie Clark is back with yet another innovative and original effort, spewing with strange lyrics and brilliant guitar riffs. The opener, ‘Rattlesnake’, straight away springs into life, Annie singing AH-AH-AH-AH-AH-OHHH-OHHH as she asks, ‘Am I the only one in the only world?’ before the first guitar riff rips in, a truly great start – she recently spoke about how she stripped naked and ran through the desert in Texas before encountering said ‘Rattlesnake’. ‘Birth in Reverse’, the first single off the album, starts off with ‘oh what an ordinary day, take out the garbage, masturbate’ in true to dystopian St Vincent style as well as ‘remember that time we went and snorted, that piece of the Berlin wall that you’d extorted’ from the almost choir-like backing of ‘Prince Johnny’. The guitar was set aside quite a lot on this album compared to 2011’s ‘Strange Mercy’, not spewing the quirky catchy riffs on there but instead showing off the excellent vocal range Clark possesses, none more evidently so on ‘I Prefer Your Love’. The song could easily pass for one of Lana Del Rey’s as Annie sings about preferring another’s love over that of Jesus’s – a play on the heaving Christian population of the US.

‘Digital Witness’ preaches the nature of constantly imaging one’s life and posting it on social media – ‘what’s the point of even sleeping if I can’t even show it’ she sings mocking the Instagram-obsessed modern generation and the need to show everything that we do. ‘Bring Me Your Loves’ uses lots of drumming and the repeating ‘Bring me your loves all your loves, your loves I wanna’ love them too you know’ to create one of the more catchy songs on the album on a somewhat disappointing second half of the album. Closing song ‘Severed Crossed Fingers’ is somewhat a dull & anticlimactic end to the album, with none of the final four or five songs having the witty lyrics like the first half, instead focusing on much heavier guitar.

St Vincent is definitely not St Vincent’s best album, but definitely second – she yet again shows the music world what a talent she is. She is definitely underrated and not well known about but is starting to become more and more popular as she collaborates with more popular artists such as The National, Kid Cudi and of course David Byrne. Maybe she lacks a catchy anthem that a wider range of people album will know, but there’s no denying that this is another solid, creative and original effort from St Vincent, full of typically-weird lyrics and exceptional guitar playing.       8/10

St Vincent live @ O2 Academy Shepherds Bush 20/02/14 Review

With St Vincent’s new album out on the 24^th, I went off to see her at the O2 Academy Shepherds Bush with high hopes – I’d already listened to the album a few times although still hadn’t listened to her second album, but heard she was good live and that she crowdsurfed (my friend touched her butt on the last tour). After arriving and a 45 minute wait with a pint, on came the support act, Glass Animals. Their songs sounded like a mix between Coldplay’s new couple of songs and Alt-J, a little stripped back and a bit trance/electronic. They were decent I would say, better than other support acts I’ve seen, but their songs seemed to all be on the same tempo without reaching any high points and it was fairly forgettable.

Just after 9 on came St Vincent and her backing band, with Annie doing a little small dance in the opening synth notes of new album opener, ‘Rattlesnake’. Clearly influenced by David Byrne on the tour of their collaboration album, she has learnt a lot from his eccentric and sometimes strange moves and talking inbetween songs. Annie’s hair was puffed up and white like a female version of Isaac Newton and her heels as per usual made her scutter around the stage in small steps, but after opening with ‘Rattlesnake’ & ‘Digital Witness’ from the new album she burst into fan favourite ‘Cruel’ from her previous album, it’s catchy guitar riff and chorus (‘CrueeEEEeEEEeeEeEEl’) being hummed and sung across the venue. She then went onto play more new stuff from the album after, including ‘Birth In Reverse’, ‘Regret’ & ‘I Prefer Your Love’, but with the album not out yet a very still crowd stood and watched as she sung her way through it but with little interaction with the crowd, albeit from comparing herself to the crowd, telling us how we both had once attempted to ‘use a bedsheet as hot air balloon’ – I can confirm that as a child I did not do such a thing.

Throughout the set she continued playing some of her greatest hits, the likes of ‘Surgeon’ & ‘Cheerleader’ from ‘Strange Mercy’ and ‘Laughing with a Mouth Full of Blood’ & Marrow from ‘Actor’ (although she didn’t play my favourite song ‘Now, Now’) and the crowd started to get more & more louder but never too much and the atmosphere was very disappointing. She ended before the encore with Record Store Day release ‘Krokodil’, a song about the cheap but very damaging drug ravaging Eastern Europe – this normally comes with a St Vincent crowd surf but she just ran about the stage disappointingly, but did accept a rose thrown at her.

She finished with an encore of ‘The Bed’ and ‘Your Lips are Red’ but I couldn’t help thinking that she lacks stage presence without David Byrne – she had little interaction with the crowd and it didn’t help that the album hadn’t been released yet with it only being a mini pre-album tour, but even with her more better-known songs the crowd were static. Her guitar playing was as per usual it a brilliant level, the notes crunching through the speakers and the backing band were excellent too, but there was definitely something missing.      7/10